SINGLE DAD BIKER

The plastic grocery bags cut into Amelia Vance's fingers as she pushed through the automatic doors of Miller's Market. Two years. Two years since she fled this suffocating small town and the man who had shattered her heart into pieces so small she wasn't sure they will ever fit back together.

The late afternoon sun painted everything in golden hues that should have been beautiful, but all Amelia felt was the familiar knot of anxiety in her chest.

Coming back here was a mistake. She knew it the moment she signed the lease on the little house across from the elementary school. But running away hadn't healed her; it had just postponed the inevitable reckoning with her past.

She fumbled for her car keys, desperate to get home before…

"Amelia."

That voice. Rough velvet and broken promises, it stopped her heart mid-beat. She has heard it in her dreams for two years, but hearing it now, in real life, made her legs go weak.

Slowly, she turned.

Deacon "Grim" Miller stood twenty feet away, leaning against a black Harley Davidson like he owned the world. He looked older… lines around his dark eyes that had not been there before, silver threading through his black hair. But he was still devastatingly handsome in that dangerous way that had always made her forget every reason she should run from him.

"What are you doing here?" The words came out as barely a whisper.

He pushed off the bike, taking a step closer. She could see the uncertainty in his posture, so different from the man who used to command every room he entered. "I saw you through the window. Thought I was seeing ghosts."

The pain in his voice nearly undid her. This was the man who told her she was "just convenient babysitter," who called her "too easy," who'd made her feel like a fool for loving him. But the way he was looking at her now...

"Don't." She held up a hand when he took another step. "Just... don't."

"Amelia, please. I need to tell you…"

"Tell me what?" The words came out of her mouth with anger, two years of hurt and anger finally finding their voice. "That you are sorry? That you didn't mean it when you said I was nothing more than a free babysitter? When you told me I was too pathetic to see that you were just using me for sex?"

His face went ashen. "I never meant…"

"You meant every word." She turned away, her hands shaking as she tried to unlock her car. "You made that perfectly clear."

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked on the words. "God, Amelia, I'm so sorry. For everything. I should have, I should have been honest with you. I should have fought for us instead of…"

The apology she had waited two years to hear hit her like a physical blow. It was everything she  screamed for, begged for, cried for in those final, devastating days before she fled. He was too proud then, too wrapped up in his club and his secrets to offer her even that small piece of himself.

Tears blurred her vision. She couldn't let him see them fall. Couldn't let him know that after all this time, he could still break her with a few simple words.

"Two years too late," she whispered, and drove away.

In her rearview mirror, she watched him stand motionless in the parking lot until she turned the corner. Only then did she pull over and let the sobs come… for the man she loved, for the future they almost had, and for the little girl who called her "Miss Amelia" in a voice full of hope and trust.

Coming back to this town meant facing all of it again. The question was: could she survive him twice?