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Reed stands there like a dream and nightmare wrapped into one. When he waves and turns around, I take a step forward.

“That’s it?” I ask.

He nods, checking his phone. “I gave myself an hour, and the drive is twenty minutes, so I need to go. So, yes, that’s it.”

“But–”

He shrugs. “I didn’t know how you’d react, so I didn’t want to interrupt everything you have here.”

My heart plummets as he walks backwards. I look at the driver in the vehicle he’s walking to. He caught an Uber.

My lungs feel tangled as I watch him get into the car.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, closing the door and facing forward.

Shit.

I watch him drive off. Is he serious? This has to be a joke.

“Everything okay?” Frank asks, standing next to me.

A tear falls from my eye. It feels like I’m watching my heart drive off. But I suck it up and wipe my face.

“Yes,” I say to Frank. “I’ll be okay.”

For the first time since this has happened, I finally understand what it feels like to be walked away from. This entire time I’ve been the one running, and now that I’m standing here watching his Uber drive off, I feel like my heart has been torn from my chest.

Time really doesn’t heal all wounds.

The rest of the day passes in distraction.

I muddle through sessions with clients who deserve better than a therapist whose mind keeps wandering to sunflowers and handwritten notes.

Every time my office door opens, my heart jumps like maybe he’s come back.

Like maybe one gesture wasn’t enough and he’s here to complicate my carefully constructed peace.

But it’s just clients. Just the steady parade of people working through anxiety and relationship issues and the small tragedies that make up ordinary life. Problems I can actually solve, unlike the Reed-shaped complication that’s apparently still lodged in my chest like shrapnel.

By evening, I’m exhausted from hypervigilance. From listening for footsteps that don’t come, for knocks that never happen, for phone calls from numbers I know by heart. I order takeout and sit on my couch, staring at the sunflowers while CNN plays background noise about things that don’t matter.

My phone buzzes, which shouldn’t make my pulse race but absolutely does.

Reed: Just landed at my layover. Thanks for accepting the flowers.

That’s it?

Relief and disappointment war in my chest, both equally irrational.

Of course he left. What did I expect? Some grand romantic gesture where he sweeps me off my feet and we pretend the last six months didn’t happen?

That careers can be rebuilt, and trust can be restored with flowers and good intentions?

Outside my window, Phoenix spreads under desert stars, two thousand miles from snow and hockey rinks and the man who apparently still knows exactly how to find my pressure points.

I should be angry. Should resent him for showing up unannounced, for disrupting my peace, for leaving flowers that smell like memory and regret.

Instead, I’m just tired. Tired of pretending I don’t miss him.

Tired of building walls that apparently crumble at the first sign of his presence.

Tired of choosing safety over everything else.

The sunflowers watch me from their improvised vase, bright and stubborn in my beige apartment. I should throw them away. Should delete his number, block any possible communication, return to the slow work of forgetting someone who refuses to stay forgotten.

Instead, I carry them to my bedroom and set them on the nightstand where I’ll see them first thing in the morning. Evidence that Reed Hendrix was here, in my space, thinking about me. Proof that whatever we were or could have been still matters enough for two-thousand-mile gestures.

That night, I dream of him. Not the dramatic Vegas version or the angry Chicago version, but just Reed.

Sitting across from me in some imaginary coffee shop, talking about kids and hockey and all the small ways we’ve learned to be better.

Dream-Reed doesn’t apologize or make grand pronouncements.

He just exists in my subconscious, easy and real, like someone I could love without destroying everything.

I wake up missing someone who was never really mine, in a bed that smells like sunflowers.

And for the first time since Chicago, I let myself wonder what would happen if I stopped running.

What would happen if, just once, I chose to stay.