The night was a canvas of uncertainty, painted with the soft glow of your phone screen and the weight of unresolved emotions. Leon's text hung in the air like a ghost—unexpected, charged, impossible to ignore.

I'm on my way back to New York. I want to see you. I need to talk to you.

Those thirteen words carried the gravity of a thousand unspoken conversations. Four months of silence, of carefully constructed emotional barriers, were about to crumble with a 43-hour journey that represented more than just miles—it was a pilgrimage of redemption.

You remembered the last time you'd seen him. The argument that felt like a nuclear winter, words sharp as shattered glass, each syllable designed to wound. San Francisco had been his escape, work his shield, distance his armor. And now? He was willingly dismantling every defense.

The cursor blinked on your screen. Your fingers hovered, trembling slightly. What do you say to someone who left, who's now returning without warning? What do you say to the person who knows every landscape of your heart, who's mapped its territories and left them unexplored?

You typed. Deleted. Typed again.

"Okay."