When I told Cal Ellis I loved him, he looked at the coffee between us instead of at me. "I'm letting you stay because my mom asked me to," he said. I had been living in his family's house for six weeks, after a burst pipe made my apartment unlivable and my mother left town for a nursing contract. Cal's mother had offered me a room; Cal had offered me rides, dinners, and the quiet kind of attention I'd mistaken for a promise. I wanted to believe his answer was only fear talking. Instead, I packed my own life into boxes and started making plans that didn't depend on him. But in a town small enough for every silence to travel, leaving might be the only way to find out whether Cal ever saw me as more than a favor.