“No.”
She leaned forward.
“But I know what it’s like to build a whole life around something you don’t want to feel.”
Ronan rose.
The movement was so sudden that Elena’s chair scraped as she instinctively straightened.
“There,” he said.
“There what?”
“You’re afraid.”
“Of course I’m afraid.”
That answer stopped him.
Elena looked up at him.
“Brave and stupid aren’t the same thing.
I know you can hurt people.
I also know you’ve had months to hurt me and haven’t.”
Ronan reached for his coat.
“You shouldn’t serve my table anymore.”
Elena stared at him.
“Excuse me?”
“Marco will assign someone else.”
“So this is what you do when somebody says something you don’t like?”
“It isn’t about what I like.”
“Then what is it about?”
Ronan slipped into the black coat.
“People near me become useful to people who want to hurt me.”
The meaning reached her.
Her anger disappeared.
Ronan opened the door.
“The safest place for you,” he said, “is away from me.”
Then he walked into the rain.
The following Thursday, his corner table remained empty.
Marco refused to discuss it.
Elena pretended not to care.
She served a birthday party near the kitchen, an elderly man who sent back his soup twice, and a couple who spent dinner looking at their phones instead of each other.
At nine thirty, she glanced toward Ronan’s booth.
At ten fifteen, she did it again.
At closing, Marco found her wiping a table that had already been cleaned.
“He was right,” Marco said quietly.
Elena looked at him.
“About what?”
“You being safer.”
She folded the cloth.
“You all talk about him like he’s a weather system.
Like nobody around him gets to make a choice.”
Marco’s expression grew tired.
“You haven’t seen what grief did to that man.”
“I think I have.”
“No.
You’ve seen what came after.”
Elena looked at the empty booth.
The next Thursday, Ronan did not come either.
Nor the Thursday after that.
Elena did not call him.
She did not know his private number, and she refused to ask Marco for it.
She understood enough about Ronan Vale now to know that chasing him would only confirm what he already believed: that caring for someone created a debt, a weakness, a target.
So she did the only thing nobody in his world seemed willing to do.
She let him choose.
