Chapter 38
thirty-eight
LAILA
“Laila… honey?”
Holden’s voice filters through the fog of sleep—the ghosts of my future, our future, whispering at the edges of my dream.
My heart pounds in my chest.
I don’t want to open my eyes and find I’m somewhere else, anywhere other than back at Wanderlust Refuge with him.
Cautiously, I open one eye and then the other.
Worry lines his forehead and eyes, his usual smile turned down at the edges.
“You’re okay,” he whispers. “You were talking in your sleep. Sobbing. Something about ‘tell me I can change it’.” He drags a hand down his face. “Honey, you scared me.”
He’s purposefully holding himself back, the lines in his body tense and almost trembling.
I think I need the physical reminder that he’s actually here—that I can touch him—as much as he needs the comfort, so I push myself upright and scoot closer until our legs touch, plaid against plaid, warmth against warmth.
When I wrap my arms around him, he exhales a shaky breath and gathers me up, like he’s been waiting to breathe again.
It’s like my entire body weeps and sighs all at once.
He’s real. He’s here.
After a moment, he shifts me easily onto his lap, chest to chest, heartbeat to heartbeat.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I was having a bad dream. If it was a dream.”
The desperation to break through the invisible wall still vibrates inside me, and I cling to him a little tighter.
“Do you want to talk about it?” He asks, his breath hot puffs of air against my neck.
I don’t, but I probably should.
We can’t start a new chapter if I don’t do the things that make me uncomfortable, and that starts with being completely unfiltered. No pretending I’m fine or that things aren’t worse than they are. No shouldering everything by myself.
I didn’t understand what Holden asked me to do a year ago; I only thought I did.
I know now.
But since I’d never seen or experienced a true partnership, I didn’t know how to take part in one.
“I had more than one. But the last one—the one you heard—everyone moved on without me. Ella and Luke moved to her farm, and everyone had new traditions. They were building a whole new life, one that even included you. But I wasn’t part of it.
There was an invisible wall. I thought if I kept my distance, I could protect everyone, but all I did was disappear. ”
His arms tighten around me, then ease enough for him to look at me. Pain flickers across his face, quiet but deep.
“Do you really think that’s how your story ends?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “It felt real. It still does. Maybe I deserve it.”
I glance toward the pillow wall and swallow.
He reaches out and gently nabs my chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning my face to look him in the eye again.
“Don’t ever let me hear you say that again, Laila.”
“What?”
“That you deserve it. That you’re the villain in this story.”
Relief unfurls in my chest, loosening the tension that’s lived there for months.
His words are sunshine breaking through the darkness.
He keeps his voice steady. “You’re not the villain, honey. You never were. I think you’ve just been trying to finish a story that stopped belonging to you a long time ago. That’s why you stopped feeling like you fit.”
Something inside me cracks open. Maybe it’s everything I saw in those glimpses, maybe it’s years of pretending I was fine. Either way, it spills out.
“I want to believe you, but I pushed you away, Holden. When things got scary and tough, I built a wall. It’s all I know how to do.” I gesture to the pillow wall as if he needs the reminder.
“You didn’t know how to deal with your mom. Laila, no one would know how to survive that cleanly. You asked for space, and I gave it to you because that’s what you needed.”
I’ve lived a life without him, and it never felt whole. We built something together once. I saw it with my own eyes. But I don’t know how to get back there. How to bridge who I am now to the version of me I saw in that glimpse.
More than anything, I need to understand what I’m feeling. I’ve got to untangle the thoughts that have been circling ever since that one, brief interaction with my mother. I can’t let them go.
“You’ve always needed someone,” she’d said, her words sharp as glass. “You don’t know who you are without someone else holding you up. Do you honestly think you’d be where you are without me?”
The truth is, I would. Sweet Treats is doing well, and Annie’s accounts are, too. Everything I know about social media, I built myself.
But Holden is different. He’s a piece of my story I can’t quite place, one I don’t know how to fit yet.
I press my lips together. “How do you know that what we have isn’t codependent?”
He blinks. “A what?”
“A codependent relationship. What if I’m relying on you to feel whole and happy? I always seek you out when I need to feel level again—when I can’t breathe and the world makes no sense.”
He shakes his head slowly. “That’s not what this is.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He traces a thumb down the track of a tear. “Because you’ve never been afraid to stand on your own. You’ve built boundaries, and you’ve kept them—even when it broke both of us. You don’t lean on me to exist, honey. You just… let me stand with you while you find your balance.”
“Then why does it feel all wrong?”
“Because you’re learning what it feels like to have a partner. You’re finally figuring out you don’t have to do it all alone.”
His words settle in the space between us, soft and steady. Holden through and through. The storm outside hisses against the window, but inside, everything is still.
“It feels… new,” I admit. “Like standing somewhere I’ve never been before.”
“Most good things do,” he murmurs.
He doesn’t move to fill the silence, and for the first time in forever, the silence isn’t too loud. I always needed noise to drown out all my overthinking. Is the quiet because I said too little? Too much? Now, it just feels like peace.
I tuck my head under his chin and let the rhythm of his heartbeat steady mine. It reminds me of us falling asleep on the couch after a full day of working together as parents.
The choosing.
The staying.
The learning how to be brave together.
“Thank you for not giving up on me,” I whisper.
“Never,” he says simply.
He presses a kiss to the crown of my head, and I don’t think anything has ever felt so sweet. Not the kind of sweet that feels like a trick—more like the kind that feels like home. Maybe that’s all I ever needed to learn: I just had to follow the gumdrops to get here.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, the ghosts are quiet. The walls fall. And for the first time in a long time, I stop bracing for what comes next.
The bridge at Sweetheart Springs promised we’d find our way back. Maybe it never meant the same bridge, just the same hearts.
The world outside has transformed, just like me.
The storm is calm now; the wind is subdued to a whisper. Snow still glitters across the porch rails, soft and thick like frosting. It’s no longer overcast; the faintest strips of gold line the clouds, sunlight stretching over the yard in quiet ribbons.
It feels like a reset for both the weather and me. A second chance at a new day.
I push open the door that leads onto the porch outside the kitchen.
The hinges creak and yawn like they’re coming out of a deep sleep.
I’m glad I grabbed the blanket off the bed for warmth.
The air is frosty, with a bite I’d forgotten Texas winter has.
But it also smells clean, like wood smoke, snow, and a drift of freshly brewed coffee from inside.
Instinctively, I pull it tighter around myself.
Holden is out by the woodpile, stacking the last of the firewood into his arms. For a moment, I just stand there, watching him through the light. He looks up, catches sight of me, and smiles. It’s soft and familiar and so heartbreakingly real that my knees go a little weak.
The haze that used to glimmer at the edges of those glimpses is gone, and I’m relieved that part is over. I appreciate what the first one showed me—a life I never let myself hope for—but the second left me shaken.
I’ve always known Holden was home, but I didn’t realize how deep my roots already spread. We started a life together long before I ever recognized it, tangled up in a way I never want to undo.
“I just needed to be sure you were real,” I say when he steps onto the porch.
He sets the wood down with a soft thud and closes the space between us. “Oh, I’m real, honey. You’re stuck with me.”
His hands snake beneath the blanket to find mine—warm, callused, steady—and I open the blanket enough for him to step closer. I wrap the blanket around both of us, and when he presses his lips to mine, the rest of the world blurs out of focus.
He’s gentle, and my entire body is alive, humming with newfound clarity. I tangle my hands in his hair, tugging him closer as the kiss deepens—no fear, no holding back, no tentative dance. Only promises, hope, and golden light.
Every kiss with Holden rocks my world, but there’s a new element to this one. One laced with promises and hope and golden light that makes it all so much brighter. There’s no holding back, no tentative dance, no ‘we’ve been married for years’.
All of that is etched on my heart forever.
But now I want to etch new memories. Build a new future.
If it looks like the one I left, I can’t imagine anything better. But it could be even better.
We’re finally in the same place, and with the firm grip of his hands on me, like he can’t hold me tight enough, I’m on cloud nine. Ella’s foot-pop theory has nothing on the magic between us right now.
“I’ve seen so many versions of us,” I whisper when we break apart. “Some that hurt. Some that felt like dreams. But in every one of them, Holden…” I swallow the lump in my throat. “In every alternate timeline, I choose you. Every time.”
His eyes shine, warm brown threaded with gold, catching the light like sunlight through honey. “Then we’ll keep choosing each other,” he says. “As many times as it takes.”
He doesn’t rush the kiss that follows either. It’s gentle, almost reverent—the kind that feels like an answer rather than a question. The world hums quietly around us—no burning, no running, no ghosts left to chase.
Just the two of us standing in the golden aftermath.
When we finally part, our foreheads rest together, breaths mingling in the cold air.
“What’s going on with you?” he murmurs. “Last night—”
“I was scared and stupid. Same as October. And every weekend before that.”
He laughs softly, and the sound rumbles through me. “You weren’t stupid. Just scared. And I get that. You were protecting your heart.”
I shake my head. “That’s not what I mean. Holden, I’ve seen what we can be.”
“I have too,” he says, thumb brushing my cheek. “For a long time.”
“No,” I whisper. “I saw it. All of it. We lived here. We had two kids—Luna and Henry—and they were perfect. Gumdrop’s still with me,” I whisper. “He’s been my breadcrumb all along. The house was full of love, laughter, and gingerbread. I didn’t think something so beautiful could be ours.”
His voice is quiet. “What else?”
“Luna loves to read. Henry’s fearless. You paint. I bake. We laugh a lot.” My throat tightens. “I once thought love was supposed to burn red—loud, reckless—but this feels golden. Steady. True. And I want it—all of it—with you.”
“You could’ve just said you missed me.”
I laugh through a tear. “I did. Every version of me did.”
He brushes his lips against my forehead. “Then maybe you finally found your way home.”
“I think I did,” I say. “I just had to stop running long enough to see it.”
“Turns out the gumdrops were right where I left them,” I murmur, smiling through tears. “Still shining. Still leading me home.”
His arms come around me, pulling me into his warmth as the last traces of sunlight spill across the snow.
“I’m a patient man,” he murmurs. “You were always worth the wait.”
“I love you,” I breathe. “And I’m done waiting. I choose us.”
He grins, soft and steadily. My boy with the bread. “Welcome home, honey.”