All Chapters of Almost Yours: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Silence didn’t calm the town.It fed it.Rihanna felt it everywhere—in the way conversations paused when she entered a room, in the way people looked at her and then looked away too quickly, like they’d already decided what they believed. Nothing was said outright. Nothing had to be.Dennis kept his distance.Not from her exactly—but from the world. He still showed up at night. Still walked beside her when the streets were empty. Still held her hand in the dark like it was something fragile. But in daylight, he became careful. Measured. Quiet in a way that felt strategic.“Give it time,” he kept saying. “It’ll pass.”Time passed.It didn’t.A week after the pond, Rihanna ran into someone she barely knew at the grocery store. The girl smiled too brightly and said, “So… you and Dennis, huh?” like it was a joke they were both in on.Rihanna smiled back, polite and controlled, and went home with her chest tight.That night, she sat on her bed and scrolled through her emails—something she’

The countdown didn’t start with excitement.It started with silence.Two months. Sixty days. A number that sounded clean and manageable until it began pressing down on everything else. For Rihanna, it felt like relief sharpened into focus. For Dennis, it felt like time collapsing inward.Rihanna had been preparing for this long before she said it out loud.Her documents were already in order—passports, transcripts, acceptance letters, financial proofs. Everything sat neatly organized in folders on her laptop and in a slim binder she kept in her bag like something fragile and precious. She knew the process. She’d researched it late at night, quietly, long before Willow Creek became too small to breathe in.When Dennis saw how ready she was, something flickered behind his eyes.“You’ve… done all this already?” he asked one evening, flipping through the papers spread across her desk.She nodded. “I didn’t want to rush when the time came.”“The time came fast,” he said, attempting a smile

The problem wasn’t that Dennis disappeared.It was that he stopped pretending not to.In the final weeks before London, he grew careless. Not cruel — careless. The kind that comes from exhaustion rather than arrogance.He forgot to hide his phone once.Just once.It buzzed on the kitchen counter while he was in the shower, lighting up with a name Rihanna hadn’t seen before. No message preview. Just familiarity in the way it appeared, unguarded.Rihanna didn’t pick it up.She didn’t need to.When Dennis came back, towel around his waist, he reached for the phone too quickly. His eyes flicked to her face, searching for reaction.She gave him none.That unsettled him more than anger ever could.“You’re quiet,” he said.“I’m listening,” she replied.The difference mattered.The next betrayal wasn’t subtle.It was logistical.Dennis missed an appointment — one tied directly to his London paperwork. One Rihanna had reminded him about twice. When she asked where he’d been, he didn’t have a s

They met on a Tuesday.Nothing about it felt final.The sky was pale and undecided, the kind that couldn’t commit to rain or sunlight. Dennis texted her that morning like he always did when he wanted to pretend things were normal.Can we talk? Just once.Rihanna stared at the message for a long time before replying.Okay.They met near the old café, the one that had survived everything—lockdowns, gossip, changing owners—by staying exactly the same. Dennis was already there when she arrived, hands in his pockets, shoulders tense. When he saw her, his face softened in that familiar way that still hurt.“Hey,” he said.“Hey.”They walked instead of sitting. It felt easier not to be still.For a while, they talked about safe things. The weather. How quiet the town felt lately. How strange it was that life kept moving even when everything else felt paused. Dennis cracked a joke. Rihanna laughed, surprised by how easily it came.For a moment, it almost felt like before.“I hate that it got

Dennis missed her in ways that didn’t make sense.Not in the loud, cinematic way people talked about. Not in the way that made you run through airports or cry into your hands. He missed her in the small, stupid moments—reaching for his phone without thinking, hearing a laugh on TV that sounded like hers, turning his head at the wrong time because his brain still expected to see her on the porch across the street.He missed her most when he had nothing else to fill the space.And that was the problem.Because Dennis didn’t know how to sit with emptiness.He knew how to win. How to charm. How to be wanted without having to want anyone back. For twenty years, he’d been the guy girls leaned toward—hands on his arm, smiles too practiced, invitations that required no commitment.He was the one who decided.Not the one who waited.Rihanna had flipped that without even trying.She hadn’t chased him. She hadn’t begged. She hadn’t clung to him when he started pulling away. She’d done something