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I stare at the bag. At the door. At this man standing in my living room in the dark, wearing the clothes I gave him, in the apartment he cleaned and fixed and filled with his presence for weeks, and he was going to walk out of it because—

“Why?” My voice comes out raw. Cracked. “Why would you—after everything, after the wedding, after—” I can’t finish. My throat is too tight.

“Because you deserve more than me.”

The words land in the room like a dropped glass. Sharp. Final.

“Ruby.” He takes a step toward me, then stops, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to be close right now. “I can’t give you children. I can’t give you a wedding your mother can cry at without a cover story. I can’t grow old with you. I can’t eat dinner with your family without lying about everything I am. I can’t give you a future that you deserve.”

His voice is steady, but his hands are not. They’re at his sides, and I can see the tension in his fingers, the way they’re pressing against his legs like he’s physically holding himself in place.

“I’ve calculated every scenario,” he says. “Every version of our life together. And in every one of them, you lose something. Something you shouldn’t have to lose. Something a human man could give you without trying.”

“So you were going to decide that for me.” It’s not a question. My voice is harder than I mean it to be, and I don’t soften it because I’m angry. I’m angry in a way that surprises me—not at him, not exactly. At the logic. At the clean, perfect, irrefutable math that says the best thing he can do for me is disappear.

“You were going to pack a bag and leave while I was sleeping and take away my choice because your math said it was better for me?”

“Ruby—”

“No.” I step forward. My feet are cold on the floor and my eyes are burning, and I’m standing in a T-shirt and underwear in my own living room at four in the morning, and I have never been more awake. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to decide what I deserve. You don’t get to calculate my future and remove yourself from it because the numbers came back wrong.”

“The numbers are right.”

“I don’t care about the numbers!”

The words echo in the apartment. Somewhere outside, a car passes, headlights sweeping across the ceiling and disappearing.

Aiden is looking at me with those eyes—dark, steady, the faint amber behind them that comes out when he’s running at full capacity—and I can see it. The pain. Not system conflict, not a processing error. Pain. Real, human, ragged pain from a man who loves me so much he tried to leave because he thought leaving was the loving thing to do.

I think about a conversation I had with Gemma two nights again. We’d been texting while I laid in bed, anxious and worried and completely unsure what to do about this whole thing with Aiden.

Me: Is this crazy? I’d asked her.

She’d rattled off a list of responses.

Gemma: He’s kind to you.

He adores you.

He believes in you and the bakery.

And he treats you well. (which is an understatement!)

There was a long pause, and three bouncing dots while she typed, deleted and retyped her reply.

Gemma: The real question is—are you okay with the fact that he’s… different?

And that’s just it. I’ve searched myself for the answer, and the only one that seems to matter time and again is the way he treats me.

Me: Is it crazy if I am?

Gemma: Here’s what I really think. You could wait around, and date around… or you could choose what’s right in front of you.

Wait. Or choose.

Is it really that simple?

Wait for something that might never come. Someone like Josh who acted like my ambitions, the bakery were silly. Someone who might eventually just break my heart anyway.