Chapter 21 #2
“Reno’s right,” he said, and the laughter banked itself to listen because Doc Steele wasn’t known for making speeches.
“I bought this house because I needed a home to bring my daughter to and a place to see my patients. I had a family once, but I lost most of it, and I reached a conclusion about myself that I held onto for a very long time. I won’t repeat what that conclusion was at a wedding, except to say that I was wrong, and it took the stubbornest woman in Montana to convince me of that.
” He came around the table. The room had gone so quiet the ceiling fans turning overhead could be heard.
“I’m done sitting out this whole romance magic of Cobbler Cove’s.
I want a family of my own again. I want a loud table and a full house and a kettle that never gets to go cold.
And there’s exactly one woman on this earth I want it with. ”
He crossed the parlor floor she’d brought back from the dead, and he went down on one knee in front of Sunny in plain sight of the entire town.
He took out of his breast pocket an antique ring Madison had helped him pick out.
She’d sworn it was perfect and Sunny would love it, and he trusted his daughter’s judgment completely.
“Susannah Carter,” he said formally, “Will you do me the greatest honor of marrying me?”
Chloe woke up, blinking into the pregnant silence. The room held its breath as Sunny looked down at him, her eyes shining and her chin held high. Being the woman she was talking to the man he was, she answered his proposal with the unvarnished truth.
“I already wrote it down,” she said. “In ink. Yes.”
A cheer went up that just about knocked the house off its foundation.
Somewhere in the roar, Grace was crying into Reno’s lapel, Ruth Sanger was committing every detail to memory for future retellings, and Jenna Crawford, one hour married, was applauding the upstaging of her own wedding like it was the best wedding gift she could’ve asked for, which, she would insist for years afterward, it was.
Hank stood and put the ring on Sunny’s finger, and then, because the next part mattered more to him than the ring did, he kept hold of her hand and said the rest of it quietly, underneath the noise, for her alone.
“You lost your name to a man once, and you had to claw your own back out of the wreckage of his life. I will not be a second man to take your name from you. So it’s your choice, and any answer is the right one.
Keep Carter. Hyphenate it. Take my name if you’d like.
I just want you by whatever name you choose to call yourself. ”
Sunny, who’d been given many things by many people but had never once been handed the freedom of choice itself, felt the last locked door inside her open at his offer, exactly the way stubborn locks finally give way when nobody is trying to force them open.
“Steele,” she said. “Just Steele. Perry was taken from me. Carter I dug back out with my own hands. This is the first name I’ve ever gotten to choose, and I’m choosing Steele. Sunny Steele.”
“That’s a terrible name,” Madison said, arriving with the other four children in formation behind her. “It sounds like a cartoon superhero. But I love it.”
“Do we get to be Steeles too?” Harris demanded.
“That’s up to your mother,” Hank said, “and to each of you.”
The twins looked at each other, and an entire parliament convened and adjourned in silence between them. “Steele,” they said together, with the gravity of kings signing a treaty.
Presley said it next, quieter, looking up at Hank with her whole heart in her eyes, “I want to be Presley Steele because you’re my dad now.”
Hank Steele, who’d held a town together through death, confessions, a funeral, grief the size of the whole valley without once coming apart, came apart right there in front of the whole town. And not one soul present held it against him.
Chloe, consulted last, considered the matter from Sunny’s shoulder. “Chloe Steele,” she pronounced. “And also a horse.”
“The motion is carried,” Madison declared. “Welcome to the Steele family, all of you!”
A giant group hug ensued with Hank more at the bottom of it than in the middle of it . . . and loving every second of it.
Much later, when the band had packed up, the last casserole dish had been claimed, and Rose had hugged everyone within reach twice, Hank stood on his front porch with his arm around his future wife and watched the taillights trail away down the street.
The lamp burned in the office window behind them. Above them, the third floor stood ready, six bedrooms and the attic playroom, waiting out their engagement until the family was official, as patient as the old wood it was built of.
“Ruth got her happy ending,” Sunny said against his shoulder.
“Ruth got her good beginning,” Hank replied. “She’ll be telling this story for the next twenty years.”
He looked back through the front door at Madison and Presley coming down the staircase in search of bootlegged slices of wedding cake, at the twins asleep in a heap on the parlor rug like spent puppies, at the whole crumb-strewn, flower-drowned, overflowing trash cans wreck of his house, and couldn’t believe his heart could be so full of joy.
For just a second the old voice in his head whispered, you ruined me.
You chose to ruin yourself, he thought back, and I choose to be happy. The words, finding nothing left in him to latch onto, passed on through and dissipated like smoke drifting up toward the starry sky, gone forever.
A family for Hank. It had taken the town nine months, eight other men’s happiness, and one very stubborn widow with four rambunctious children to get through to him. But this town, like its doctor, always finished what it started.
Want to spend a little more time with Hank, Sunny, and their herd of kiddos, enjoy a little more of their happily ever after, and watch the WoWS throw down a challenge that’ll take the whole next Cobbler Cove series (coming in December 2026) to fulfill?
Access an exclusive (and emotional) bonus scene in my note to you at the end of this chapter.
…and now for a sneak peek at a brand news series coming in August 2026 from Cynthia Dees and her daughter, Sarah.
It’s called Second Chance Ranch, and it’s run by a matchmaker who matches pets with their perfect humans.
First up on her agenda, an anxious German Shepherd named Summit who’s going to need help
RESCUING GARRETT …
Mia Chester pressed her forehead against the cold passenger window of best girlfriend Riley’s truck and watched Montana unfold before her like a promise she wasn’t sure she believed in anymore.
Mountains. Actual mountains, not the Cascade foothills she’d gotten used to calling mountains back in Seattle.
These were the real deal; snowcapped peaks that scraped the underbelly of the sky, their slopes carpeted in dark evergreens that looked almost black against the gentling afternoon light.
They rose from the earth like something ancient and immovable, the kind of thing that made a person feel very, very small.
Small wasn’t necessarily bad, Mia decided.
Small meant her problems were small too.
Small meant the disaster she’d left behind in Seattle, from the burnout, the disillusionment, to the slow death of every romantic notion she’d ever held, were just tiny specks in the grand scheme of things.
And specks were easy to clean up. Easy to forget and move on from.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
“You’re being awfully quiet over there.” Riley glanced at her from the driver’s seat, one eyebrow raised, part concern, part gentle teasing. “Having second thoughts?”
“Third and fourth thoughts, actually.” Mia straightened in her seat and attempted a smile she hoped was convincing. “But I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You are.” Riley’s expression softened, her grip relaxing on the steering wheel. “And I’m really glad. We all are.”
Behind them, their friends Jazz and Paige followed in Jazz’s beat-up SUV, loaded down with all their worldly possessions, or at least the possessions that had survived the great Seattle purge, as Paige had dubbed their collective downsizing.
Their last friend making the move with them, Sloane, had driven up two days earlier to handle the paperwork on their new rescue facility, because of course Sloane had. The woman was terrifyingly efficient. She probably had color coded folders for inside her color coded folders.
Mia turned back to the window, watching fence posts blur past. She should be excited.
This was supposed to be her fresh start.
Scratch that, their fresh start. Five women who’d decided that matching rescue animals with their forever families was a better use of their collective talents than all the jobs they’d been doing before.
For Riley, that “before” had been veterinary school in Colorado, followed by a residency in Seattle that had nearly broken her.
For Jazz, it was a wedding photography career shadowed by an ex-boyfriend who didn’t understand the word “boundaries.”
Sloane had walked away from a fiancé with a family fortune and all the ugly expectations and control that came with it.
And Paige, sweet, optimistic Paige, had simply wanted an adventure with her cousin Jazz, after seeing the mean side of social media.
As for her, that “before” had been six years as Seattle’s most sought-after matchmaker.
Here was the thing almost nobody knew about Mia Chester: she was, in the most secret and least convenient way for herself, a romantic.
She’d grown up that way. Saturday afternoons on the couch with her mother and a stack of rented rom-coms, the two of them mouthing the good lines in unison.
Bedtime stories where the princess always, always found her prince.
And, this was the part that had done the real damage, she’d grown up with parents who made it all look not just possible but ordinary. The natural course of the universe was to lead you to your soulmate. Right?