Chapter 36
thirty-six
LAILA
I’m still in the living room, but all the decor is different.
It’s less cozy. Less lived in. Less mine and Holden’s home.
Worse, it’s quiet. Painfully so.
There’s no fire crackling. To be honest, I’m not sure there’s ever been one in this fireplace before. It’s too pristine for that. No endless movie loop from the movie we fell asleep watching. There’s a tree, but it’s undecorated, and the bulbs are dark and glassy.
And Holden’s heartbeat—the steady comfort I fell asleep to—is gone.
Generic Christmas decorations in neutral colors dot the mantle. All the nostalgic, colorful pieces are gone. The four stockings hanging from holders no longer exist. The furniture still has a rustic touch to it, but all the warmth of the home I fell asleep in is gone.
It feels wrong, like a photo taken in the wrong light. There’s no warmth, no trace of the path I followed here. Just gray where gold should be.
The air smells like clean laundry. Not cinnamon or sugar, no pine or wood smoke, no vanilla or cookies or gumdrops.
Sterile.
“Sebastian?” My voice cracks. “What did you do?”
There’s no answer, but I know. In my heart, I know this is another glimpse—but I won’t like this one. I’d like it a lot less if he shows me my own grave, and this is decades in the future.
But I don’t think Sebastian is even that morbid.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table, and I snatch it up, desperate for a clue. The notification is from our sister message thread, and relief pours through me. At least I still have them, in whatever alternate universe this is.
Bridget: Breakfast is almost ready—you said you’d be here at nine.
Bridget: Where are you?
My fingers hover on the screen. Where is here?
Ella: The kids are going to eat without you. Hurry up!
Ella: And don’t tell me you’re lost. That excuse is old. You know exactly how to get home.
Ella: It was once yours, too.
My breath shudders out. Ella and Luke finally moved into the farmhouse.
Ella: Colt says to bring the tree topper. You still have it, right? They insist that ‘Aunt Laila’ needs to put it up again this year.
My heart cracks down the middle.
I don’t know how many kids my sister has. I’m an ‘aunt’ to children I don’t even know anymore, or never even knew at all.
Bridget: Don’t forget cookies for the exchange at The Storybook Cafe. Holden dropped his off already, and he said you’re not allowed to bring the cookies with the trees on them again from the store.
Bridget: He muttered something about blasphemy.
“But they’re nostalgic,” I say to no one. “It doesn’t matter if they taste good.”
A memory slips into my mind, unbidden and mostly unwelcome: Holden's arms around my waist, teasing me after he walked in the door to a fresh pan of those exact cookies. Only they were pumpkins and ghosts, not Christmas trees or snowmen, because it was only two months ago.
I truly feel for Ebeneezer Scrooge at this point. That man was a victim.
The bedroom is where I fell asleep last night. Two nights ago? I’ve got no clue how time passage actually works in this instance.
Unease settles in my belly because I’ve got no clue what’s waiting for me once I get to Ella’s farm. Sebastian’s words whisper along the air: It all comes down to a decision. Free will can be such a bother sometimes.
I yank a drawer open, plucking a sweater out to get dressed. Underneath is Holden’s sweatshirt—the one I stole in September. I drop the sweater to the floor and hold it to my nose, desperate for proof he still exists.
But it only smells like laundry—like a life scrubbed clean of us.
“I made a decision,” I whisper. “I said I wanted to stay there, and I told him I loved him. What more do you want from me?”
It’s a good thing I’m alone because I can only imagine how unstable I must look, talking to a ghost that won’t even show his face.
With more hostility than my pants deserve, I yank the denim material over one leg. Then the next. As I smooth them out, my hand brushes across the outline of something in my pocket, so I reach in to see what’s there.
Sebastian’s coin.
My stomach drops. Holden tucked it into my bag before I left in October, somehow creating a magical thread between us—one that let his letters always find me. Letters I still can’t bring myself to talk about, because they were one more thing I didn’t know I needed from him.
But I gave it back to him on my first day home. I watched him put it into his pocket. There’s no logical explanation for how it’s back in mine.
Somehow, magic always circles back when I least expect it.
I squeeze my eyes closed, rubbing my thumb across the engravings, wishing to get back to my time with everything I’ve got. When I cautiously open one eye to no change, I grunt in frustration.
“More magic that makes no sense,” I mutter, shoving it back in my pocket.
The drive to Ella’s farm is too long.
Questions weigh heavily on me, and there’s no one to answer them.
I turn into her driveway, the sign for Ever After Farm in the distance.
It’s quiet here, too perfect. The colors are brighter, and the white barn in the pasture gleams in the sunlight. Perhaps it’s because the people who live here are living out their dream life.
They get the full range of the visible light spectrum.
But it’s still off, still wrong.
There’s no breeze, no laughter spilling out of the house. Just silence.
I park beside a line of cars in the grass and climb out, tucking my hands further into the sleeves of Holden’s sweatshirt. He probably won’t be here—but if he is, I guess I’ll have to explain my wardrobe choice.
Maybe he’ll think it’s funny and tease me about stealing his clothes like he always does.
There’s a crowd behind the house. Tables scattered under the mix of oak and pecan trees, string lights casting a golden light in the shade of the canopy overhead.
The Jacksons are here—kids and animals weaving through them all with wild abandon.
The string lights cast a golden shimmer through the branches—warm and unreachable, like sunlight through glass.
It shouldn’t surprise me that “breakfast” is this big of a deal, but our family never celebrated like this. Ella broke the cycle somehow, and she’s creating a whole new life for her family.
But when I try to step closer, it’s like there’s a wall. I can’t.
I’m stuck outside this life, exactly like I always feared I would be.
It’s fruitless—I know it is—but I pound on the invisible wall, anyway. My family is in there, and I need to hug Ella, to breathe her in and find a fraction of the reality I know.
Then I see him.
He’s older, silver at his temples. Handsome as ever and trending toward the silver fox look that is wildly understated.
And I missed it.
I haven’t gotten to watch the lines deepen around his eyes or his mouth from where his entire face smiles. Even once a year afforded me the luxury of watching him evolve.
Every moment I ever caught Holden watching me—memorizing me, as he always said—snaps into sharp clarity. I didn’t know the last time I saw him could be the last time.
Would be.
A woman steps closer to him, and I whisper, “Please be me. Please be me.”
Then she turns, and I can see her side profile. It’s clearly not me.
He dips his head to listen to her say something, and they both laugh—quiet laughter I can’t hear—but I can feel it. He smiles and gazes down at her in a way that he reserved for me.
But now it’s for someone else.
The hope that was built during my last glimpse shatters. Like dropping a glass from the highest story of a building.
I’m not living it this time; I’m observing. The ache in my heart doesn’t hurt any less. In fact, it feels about like that time my mother poured alcohol over my scraped knee instead of peroxide. The pain reaches all the way into my bones and won’t let go.
This should be my life.
Some people wait their entire lives to find love. I can admit—after seeing many relationships we planned weddings for fall part—it’s like catching lightning in a bottle.
Rare. Dangerous. Thrilling. Miraculous.
And instead of chasing that, instead of standing tall and reaching toward the storm, I shrank from it.
The fear that I’d disappear into someone else’s life wasn’t a warning. It was a prophecy.
And I prevented it—I kept myself safe.
But I disappeared from everyone else’s life in the process.
It all comes down to a decision. Free will can be such a bother sometimes.
The words whisper on the wind, the only sound I can make out in this horror story.
“Where are you? What did you do?” I demand.
I spin, anxious to find him.
He’s not hiding this time. Sebastian stands on the edge of the property under the cloak of shade from the trees.
“I didn’t do anything. This is all you.”
I gesture at the scene playing out in the background. “I would never choose this.”
Holden passes out cups of hot cocoa to the kids, two of them looking startlingly close to Luna and Henry. There are differences, of course, but Sebastian might as well take a knife and stab me.
It would hurt less.
“You didn’t choose at all,” he says calmly.
“But I did choose!” My voice breaks with desperation. “I told him I loved him—”
“Ah, my dear. Wanting isn’t the same as choosing.”
His words hit like a bell in an empty church—clear, echoing, impossible to ignore.
He’s right.
And it makes me feel like I’m suffocating, right here on the lawn of the house that represents the only real physical home I’ve ever had, until my mother took it away.
Holden and I never had a physical home, but his apartment always made me feel the same way. And did I ever tell him? Did I ever use those words: you’re my home? Or did he just think he was a cycle of nostalgia I clung to when my world was spinning out of control?
I press my hands to my face.
“Yes, you told him you loved him. But Laila,” he says quietly. “You didn’t show him. The walls you keep fortified with fear are strong, and you kept running. You assumed that time was on your side, when really, time doesn’t wait for people to be ready.”
“I needed to find myself first. I needed to build a life without my mother—”
“And did you?”
Sort of.
But things only click when Holden is there to support me.
“Fear lies. It tells you there will always be more time. Every story ends,” he murmurs. “Even the ones with magic.”
I suppose it should comfort me that there’s an end to all this. But it doesn’t.
When he glances at me, there’s a glint of regret in his eyes.
“Your friend Henry tried to tell you this,” Sebastian says softly. “He’s right, you know. Folklore, the rituals, the stories we tell to make sense of our lives—they exist so we don’t lose ourselves in the chaos.”
Henry’s words echo in my mind. “But sometimes you have to change the ending.”
Sebastian nods. “They grow, they bend. They stop fitting the people who wrote them.”
“Then maybe it’s time to rewrite mine,” I whisper.
He turns back to the picture-perfect Christmas breakfast happening in Ella’s backyard. Holden and my sisters and the entire Jackson family. It’s right in front of me, just out of reach.
“You built something beautiful, but you forgot to let it evolve.”
I thought I was. When we agreed to every six months instead of twelve, Sunday morning brunches. The ten days we spent together in September and October.
Letting it evolve would’ve looked like me staying. Not just building a life for myself that would absorb Holden.
We should’ve built that together. That’s the ending I’m supposed to change.
“That wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to.” I hiccup back a sob.
“Of course not. You did what you thought was best. Your mother is an overconfident narcissist who inflicted a considerable amount of damage on the three of you over the years. It was a knee-jerk reaction to trauma, Laila. No one can fault you for that.” His eyes linger on Holden. “He hasn’t. Yet.”
“Tell me I can change it,” I beg.
This is genuinely worse than seeing my grave. Worse than thinking I caused Ella’s predicament with Holly’s wedding, worse than being afraid my mother could somehow extend her villainous reach to Holden or his family.
“Of course you can.” He nods.
Snow begins to fall again—soft, steady. But this time, the edges shimmer gold. Color bleeds back into my world, and with it, the sound of his laugh. Blurred, like I’m underwater. But I don’t miss it.
“Don’t waste this,” Sebastian says. “Start a new chapter before one starts without you.”
The world blurs white.