Page 158 of Neap & Spring

The number sits in my chest like a stone.

Five years of her carrying this alone. Five years of me thinking she just didn’t care enough to stay in touch and that she’d moved on to bigger things and better people and a life that didn’t include the small-town guy she used to know.

Five years I could have been with her if he hadn’t broken her so completely she thought she had to disappear to protect me.

Five years we lost because of him.

I push off the bar stool, the legs scraping against the floor in the empty restaurant. I need to move. I need to do something with my hands that isn’t booking a plane ticket or typing another message I’ll delete or finding the nearest wall to put my fist through.

I’ve been doing this for three days. Pacing. Unable to sit still for more than ten minutes at a time. I reorganized the walk-in at two in the morning. I deep-cleaned the flat-top until my arms ached and my hands were raw. I’ve been doing anything to keep moving and busy. Anything to keep me from thinking about what I’d do to Stellan Voss if I let myself get on that plane.

After Vivienne told me everything — after I begged her to stay, to please not drive back to that cottage so late, to just sleep here where I could keep an eye on her — she left anyway. She said she needed space to process and figure out what comes next.

I sat on my couch in the dark after she walked out, and I cried. The kind of crying where your whole body shakes and you can’t catch your breath and it feels like something inside you is breaking and slowly dying.

I cried for what he did to her. He systematically broke down someone with so much talent and passion. Someone so full of fire who was born to be a chef. And he took that from her. I cried for the fact that she carried it alone for five years because she loved me enough to protect me from my own worst instincts.

She was right to disappear on me. She knew exactly what I’d do if she told me.

I would have gotten on a plane, and I would have found him. I would have destroyed my entire future, burned everything down, just to make him hurt the way she was hurting.

And she couldn’t let me do that.

So she disappeared instead. She chose to lose me rather than let me lose myself.

The wind gusts so hard the entire building groans. Through the windows, I watch a piece of debris cartwheel down the street. The ocean is a wall of violence, waves colliding with each other, churning white foam.

My phone buzzes on the bar.

I cross back to it in three long strides, grabbing it before it can buzz again, hope flaring in my chest for half a second.

It’s not her.

It’s been three days, and I’ve almost pressed the call button seventeen times. I’ve started twenty-three texts I never sent. I’ve driven past her cottage twice just to make sure her car was still there and that she hadn’t packed up and left without telling me.

The only message I’ve gotten from her came two days ago.

I open it now, reading it for probably the hundredth time.

The investors loved the event. They think the restaurant needs a total rebrand to stay viable though. They want to know what you think about changing the name.

That’s it. That’s the only communication I’ve had with her since she walked out of my apartment.

Twenty-eight professional and distant words.

Like we’re colleagues. Business associates. Not —

Not whatever we are.

Changing the name. I huff at the thought even now.

I told her what the name meant. With her feet propped up on my lap and the rain falling outside and her looking at me like I was saying something that was really important to her. I explained about the tides, about neap and spring, and wanting a restaurant that understood both the ordinary and the extraordinary.

And now the investors want to erase it.

Maybe she agrees with them. Maybe that’s why she sent the message so professionally. Maybe she thinks changing the name is a smart business move and she’s waiting for me to come to the same conclusion.

I don’t know. I can’t know because she won’t talk to me.