Day four started with rain, heavy and relentless, drumming against my bedroom window as I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I hadn't slept much. My mind wouldn't shut off, caught in an endless loop of memories and questions. The feel of Isla's lips against mine. The weight of her hand in mine. The words we'd shared. And always, always, the question: Why did she run?

Morning crawled by, each hour marked by the absence of messages on my phone. I'd stopped actively checking, but couldn't help the surge of hope every time it buzzed. Always followed by disappointment when it was just work or Theo or my mother checking in.

By noon, something in me snapped. A dam breaking, emotions flooding through after days of trying to hold them back. I couldn't do this anymore. Couldn't sit in this emotional limbo, waiting for someone who might never come back. Couldn't go another day not knowing if she was okay, if she was safe, if she was ever planning to talk to me again.

Fuck waiting. Fuck giving her space. Fuck respecting a choice she'd made without even having the decency to tell me to my face.

I called in to work, something I never did, and told them I needed a personal day. Karen, my boss, didn't even question it. Had probably been expecting it, given how distracted I'd been all week.

Then I started looking. Really looking.

Her apartment first. I couldn't get up the stairs, so I knocked on the first door I could reach, hoping someone would hear me. A woman cracked it open and informed me no one had been there for days. 

The bookstore next, where Daniel regarded me with a mixture of sympathy and wariness.

"She called in sick. Said she needed some time." His eyes were kind but firm. "I can't tell you more than that, even if I knew it."

"I just need to know she's okay."

He hesitated, then sighed. "She's alive, if that's what you're asking. Beyond that, you'll have to ask her yourself."

So she'd contacted her boss but not me. That felt like a punch to the gut, but at least it was information. I tried Mia next, who was slightly more helpful now that she knew I wasn't giving up.

"I got a text yesterday," she admitted. "Just saying she was okay and would be back soon. No details on where she was or when 'soon' might be."

"Did she mention me?"

Mia's hesitation told me everything I needed to know.

"No," she said finally. "I'm sorry."

I thanked her and hung up, frustration building. Isla was alive. Was communicating with people. Just not with me.

The rain had let up a bit, more drizzle than downpour now, as I continued my search. The coffee shop we frequented. The park where we'd fed ducks and talked about books. The art museum where we'd spent a Sunday afternoon arguing about abstract expressionism. All the places I could think of that held some significance for us.

Nothing.

By late afternoon, I was wet, tired, and no closer to finding her than when I'd started. I'd just about decided to call it a day, to go home and accept that if Isla didn't want to be found, I wasn't going to find her, when a thought struck me.

The diner. Our diner. The one where I'd found her after our fight at the bookstore. Where we'd sat for hours, talking about nothing and everything. Where she'd admitted she didn't know how to do relationships, and I'd told her I wasn't going anywhere.

It was a long shot. But at this point, long shots were all I had left.

The rain had stopped completely by the time I reached the diner, the late afternoon sun breaking through clouds, casting everything in a golden haze. I didn't see her at first, was about to go inside and check, when movement caught my eye.

There, on a bench outside the diner, sat Isla. She wasn't doing anything, wasn't looking at her phone or reading or people-watching. Just sitting, staring at nothing, a cigarette burning between her fingers. She wore the same clothes she'd left my apartment in four days ago, now rumpled and stained. Her hair hung limp around her face, which was pale except for dark circles under her eyes.

Relief hit me first, so intense I felt dizzy with it. She was here. She was alive. She wasn't lying dead in a ditch somewhere, which was the scenario my brain had been painting in increasingly vivid detail over the past four days.

Then came anger, hot and sharp. Anger that she'd put me through this. That she'd walked away without explanation after everything we'd shared. That she'd made me worry and search and imagine the worst when a simple text would have sufficed.

I wheeled toward her, stopping a few feet away. She didn't look up, didn't acknowledge my presence at all. Just took a drag of her cigarette, the ember glowing orange in the fading light.

"I thought you were dead." The words came out harsher than I'd intended.

She didn't react. Just exhaled a stream of smoke, eyes still fixed on some point in the middle distance. If she was surprised to see me, she didn't show it.

"I didn't know if I should come back," she said after a long moment, voice flat.

"That's not your choice to make."

That got her attention. She finally looked at me, and God, she looked broken. Not just tired or sad or anxious. Broken, like something vital inside her had shattered and she didn't know how to put it back together.

"Yes, it is." Her voice was hollow, empty of the warmth and humor I'd grown to love. "My life. My choices."

"Not when those choices affect other people. Not when they affect me."

She flinched, a tiny movement I might have missed if I hadn't been watching her so closely. "You're better off without me."

"Bullshit."

"It's the truth. I'm too fucked up, Callum. Too damaged. I'll just keep hurting you."

"So that's it? You decide what's best for me without even talking to me about it?"

She took another drag of her cigarette, the tremor in her hand more pronounced now. "I'm not good at talking. At explaining. At any of this."

"You were doing fine until you ran away."

"Was I?" She laughed, a harsh, brittle sound. "I was falling apart in front of you. Crying on your couch. Dumping all my trauma in your lap. Making you responsible for my mental health. That's not fine, Callum. That's fucking toxic."

I stared at her, trying to understand the logic that had led her to this conclusion. That being vulnerable, sharing her pain, accepting comfort, was somehow wrong or unfair.

"That's not what happened," I said finally. "You were struggling. You came to me. I was there for you. That's what people who care about each other do."

"Until they don't. Until it gets to be too much. Until they get tired of dealing with the constant fucking mess that is my life." She dropped her cigarette, crushing it under her heel. "I can't do that to you. I won't."

"Shouldn't that be my decision?"

"You don't know what you're signing up for."

"Then tell me." I moved closer, until I was directly in front of her, forcing her to look at me. "Tell me what I'm signing up for, Isla. All of it. The good and the bad. And let me decide if it's worth it."

She stared at me, something desperate and yearning in her eyes. "I don't know how to be loved," she whispered. "I never learned. Everyone who was supposed to teach me left or died or used it as a weapon against me."

My heart cracked open at the raw honesty in her words. At the fear and longing beneath them.

"Then let me teach you," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

She closed her eyes, a single tear tracking down her cheek. When she opened them again, there was a terrible resolve there, a decision made that I could already tell was the wrong one.

"I can't." She stood, gathering her bag. "I'm sorry, Callum. For all of it. For coming to your door that night. For letting you think this could work. For not being strong enough to stay away in the first place."

"Isla, don't do this."

"It's already done." She wouldn't meet my eyes anymore. "Please don't look for me again. It'll be easier for both of us."

And then she was walking away, her steps quick and determined despite the obvious exhaustion weighing on her. I called after her, my voice cracking with desperation, but she didn't turn around, didn't acknowledge me at all. Just kept walking until she turned a corner and disappeared from sight.

I sat there for a long time after she was gone, rain starting to fall again, soaking through my clothes, my chair, my skin. But I barely felt it. Could barely feel anything beyond the hollow ache in my chest where something had been ripped away.

She'd made her choice. A fucking stupid, self-destructive choice based on fear and lies she'd been telling herself for years. But her choice nonetheless.

And I had no idea what to do about it.

Chase her again? Force her to see what I saw, that we were better together than apart? That her damage and my damage somehow fit together in a way that made both of us stronger?

Or respect her decision, as wrong as I thought it was? Let her go, even knowing she was running not because she didn't care but because she cared too much and was terrified of it?

There were no good answers. No clear path forward. Just the rain and the emptiness and the memory of her broken expression as she'd said those devastating words.

I don't know how to be loved.

And my promise, made in a moment of desperate hope.

Then let me teach you.

A promise I had no way of keeping now that she'd walked away again. Now that she'd closed the door so firmly I wasn't sure I could find a way back in.

Now that she'd decided, for both of us, that whatever we had was too dangerous to pursue.

But as I finally turned to leave, the rain soaking into my bones, one certainty emerged from the wreckage of my thoughts. One truth I couldn't ignore or deny or rationalize away.

I loved her. God help me, I loved her. With all her scars and fears and walls. With all her sunshine and her storms. With her fierce independence and her desperate need for connection.

I loved her.