he gave me a small smile.
I returned it.
A little later, he approached.
“My train leaves at nine tomorrow,” he said.
“I thought I should tell you before I go.”
“Thank you.”
He hesitated.
“I usually walk down to the harbor early when I’m near the sea.
I might do that before breakfast.”
I nodded.
It was an invitation, but not a demand.
“Good night, Leah.”
“Good night, Owen.”
He left without asking for a kiss.
I lay awake for hours afterward.
I thought about Callum, who had always treated love as a reason to make decisions for me.
I thought about Owen, who had made a mistake and admitted it without asking me to excuse him.
And I thought about the five rules I’d written because I believed a relationship was safest when it had an ending already arranged.
At 5:42 a.m., I got out of bed.
The rain had stopped, leaving the garden bright with moisture and the glasshouse pale beneath the first daylight.
I found the folded rules on the bedside table where I’d left them after Callum’s disastrous speech.
I read them again.
Then I picked up a pen.
I crossed out the fourth rule.
No promises about anything after Sunday.
Underneath it, I wrote something new.
Tell me the truth, even when you’re afraid it might change everything.
At 6:18 a.m., I walked down toward the harbor.
Whitby was just beginning to wake.
Fishing boats rocked beside the quay, gulls circled above the roofs, and a few early customers waited outside a bakery.
Owen stood near the harbor wall with two paper cups of tea.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps.
Surprise crossed his face.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.
“Neither was I.”
He held out one of the cups.
“I bought two.
Just in case.”
I accepted it.
For a while, we watched the boats without speaking.
Then I unfolded the paper and handed it to him.
Owen read the revised fourth rule.
His face changed.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“I’m frightened.”
He nodded slowly.
“So am I.”
“I don’t want you to give up Copenhagen.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to move there.”
“I know.
But I also don’t want to pretend last night meant nothing.”
He looked at me with an expression so open it hurt.
“It meant something to me,” he said.
“What?”
He stepped closer, leaving enough space for me to move away.
“I think I’ve been falling for you since you scolded me over a rubber band in York station.”
I laughed, though my eyes had filled with tears.
“That’s an alarming amount of romance to invest in stationery.”
“It was a very good notebook.”
Then his smile faded into something more serious.
“Leah, I can’t promise eight months will be easy.
There’ll be late nights, time differences, and days when we both wonder what we’re doing.
But I can promise not to decide your future for you.
And I can promise to tell you the truth when something changes.”
I considered his words.
They weren’t perfect.
They didn’t erase the distance or guarantee that we would never hurt one another.
But they gave me something Callum never had.
A choice.
“Then let’s start with one date,” I said.
