Ryan waited until the plates were cleared, until the restaurant’s chatter became a distant hum against the red vinyl booth. He looked at her across the table. “I’m going back to Alaska.”

Riley’s fork, poised over the last piece of orange chicken, went still. She set it down carefully. The clatter of dishes from the kitchen seemed to grow louder. “When?”

“My semisters already over, My flight leaves in two weeks.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on the glossy wood grain of the table. She traced a line with her finger. “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Ryan’s voice was tighter than he intended. He’d braced for an argument, for tears, for the logical dismantling of his plan he knew she was capable of. Her quiet acceptance was a different kind of earthquake.

“What do you want me to say, Ryan?” She finally looked up. Her eyes were clear, but her smile was the one she used for polite conversation with strangers. “You’ve been miserable here. I hear it in your voice every night. I see it in your face right now.”

“I thought you’d tell me I was running away.”

“Maybe you are.” She shrugged, a small, defeated motion. “But it’s your run. I can’t… I can’t be the thing that keeps you in a cage. Even if the cage is sunny.”

The waiter left the check in a small black booklet. Ryan reached for it, but Riley’s hand got there first. Her fingers brushed his, a quick, electric touch. “I got it,” she said.

“Riley.”

“Let me.” Her voice was soft but final. She pulled a card from her wallet, her movements precise. She was treating the moment like a transaction, something to be completed neatly. It hurt more than shouting.

Outside, the LA night was warm and thick with exhaust and distant sirens. They stood beside her car in the parking lot, under the buzzing fluorescence of a streetlight. The silence between them was a physical space, filled with everything they weren’t saying.

“Dan Brewster has a room. And a job for me, at the garage,” Ryan said, filling the void with practicalities. “It’s solid.”

“I’m sure it is.” She leaned against her car door, looking at him. The perky, social butterfly was gone. In her place was someone older, wearier. “Will you be happy there?”

“I won’t feel like I’m drowning in noise.”

“That’s not the same thing as happy.”

He had no answer for that. He watched a moth beat itself against the light above them. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” She shook her head, a quick jerk. “Don’t apologize for being who you are. You’re an Alaskan. I knew that. I just…” She took a shaky breath. “I hoped maybe you could be my Alaskan. Here.”

The confession hung in the humid air. It was the closest she’d come to showing the crack in her composure.

Ryan’s hand found hers. Her fingers were cold. He laced his with them, feeling the delicate bones. This was the touch he’d craved for months, and now it tasted like goodbye. “You could visit,” he said, the words hollow even to him.

She gave a wet, quiet laugh and squeezed his hand. “Three thousand miles, Ryan. For a weekend?” She let go and turned to open her car door. From the passenger seat, she pulled out the half-empty bottle of Jameson he’d left at her apartment weeks ago. “Here. You’ll need this more than I will.”

He took the bottle. The glass was cool. Her lipstick wasn’t on the rim this time. It was meticulously clean.

She got into the driver’s seat but left the door open, one foot on the pavement. She looked up at him, and for a second, her guard was completely down. Her eyes glistened. “I do respect it, you know. Your wishes. This… this is you being a man. The hard-packed choice. I get it.”

She closed the door. The engine started. Through the window, she offered one last, fragile smile—not the Riley Jones smile for everybody, but a smaller, realer one, just for him. Then she put the car in reverse and drove away, the taillights blurring into the stream of traffic until he couldn’t tell which red light was hers anymore.

Ryan stood in the parking lot, the bottle heavy in his hand. The noise of the city rushed back in—engines, horns, a helicopter thrumming somewhere. But inside him, there was only a new, deeper kind of quiet. The kind that felt exactly like loneliness.

He hated to tell her like this, in a parking lot thick with the smell of grease and exhaust, but this country boy needed to go home. The words were a stone in his throat.