9. Faith #2
“But it also…” I search for a word that isn’t miserable. “It wasn’t really mine. My job. It was something my dad thought would be good for me. For him. It looked good. It sounded good.”
There’s a patch of silence around the table. Even the kids feel it. The air goes just a little heavier.
“Did you want to do it?” Lila persists.
There’s that question again.
Did I want… any of it?
The job. The apartment. The ring.
My throat tightens.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “I wanted to make him proud. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to feel like I wasn’t wasting my life.” I swallow. “But I don’t think I ever stopped and asked myself if I actually liked it. Or if I was just used to it.”
Dallas shifts beside me. The heat from his arm brushes mine as he leans forward, setting his fork down. I don’t have to look up to know his jaw is clenched. I can feel the tension coming off him like static.
“That’s a terrible reason to do anything,” Clay says bluntly.
“Clay,” Maggie says, warning in her tone.
“What?” He shrugs. “It is. Doing something just ’cause it makes somebody else feel big? That’s stupid.”
“Language,” she snaps.
“Stupid’ isn’t…”
She gives him The Look. The one that could make grown men shut up at fifty paces.
He subsides, stabbing a green bean.
“I’m just saying,” he mutters.
“It’s okay,” I say. And weirdly, it is. “He’s not wrong. It is dumb. Or it was. I am learning from my mistakes.”
“Anyway,” Rose says, as if sensing I’m two seconds away from either crying or throwing myself under the table, “I vote you should come help me at the school when the weather clears. Miss Millie always needs volunteers. You’d be great at organizing the Christmas play.”
“Oh my gosh, yes,” Ellie gasps. “You could help with the costumes. Last year mine was itchy.”
“And you could take pictures,” Nash says. “Your Insta stories were always better than mine.”
I blink. “You follow my Insta?”
“Obviously,” he says, like I just asked if the sky is still up. “You post pictures of donuts and Christmas lights. That’s my entire personality.”
Dallas’s fork scrapes once against his plate. I glance at him, startled. He looks… not mad, exactly. Just kind of stunned.
“You saw that stuff?” I ask Nash.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “You think Boone’s the only one who knows how to use a phone? We’re not Amish.”
Boone smirks. “I knew about the donuts. Clay showed me.”
Clay lifts his hands. “Don’t drag me into your weird dessert stalker vibe.”
“You were the one who went ‘dang, that’s a good glaze,’” Nash throws back.
“I said the glaze looked good,” Clay says. “Not in a creepy way. In a ‘I respect pastry’ way.”
“Oh, my Lord,” Maggie mutters. “I’m going to die listening to this conversation.”
“You started making more cinnamon rolls after she left,” Nash points out to his mother. “Tell me that wasn’t donut-inspired.”
Maggie ignores him and reaches for the salt.
My pulse is jittering again, but for a different reason now. Maybe not everyone in this room forgot about me when I left. Maybe they did wonder, sometimes, where I was, what I was posting, if I was happy.
“What do you want to do now?” Ellie asks, back on task, because kids are relentless that way. “Now you’re not doing the fancy parties?”
The question lands right in the softest, most unprotected part of me.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I don’t know.
I could say it. I could admit in front of this entire table that I have no idea what I want to be, that everything that’s happened the last few years was me riding my father’s tide, that the minute I stepped out of that hotel, I stepped off a map.
But every word gets stuck behind a lifetime of You should know by now. You should be further along. You should have a plan.
Dallas rescues me.
“Right now,” he says calmly, “she wants to eat her dinner. That’s enough.”
Everyone looks at him.
His gaze stays on Ellie.
“Sometimes ‘right now’ is plenty,” he adds. “Grown-ups forget that.”
Ellie considers this, then nods very seriously.
“Okay,” she says. “After dinner, we can make plans. I’ll help.”
I let out a breath that has been trapped in my lungs since I sat down.
Dallas’s thigh brushes mine under the table as he shifts back in his chair. My whole body is aware of the contact in a way that makes me want to stand up and walk it off.
I don’t.
I sit there and smell Dallas’s cedar and smoke scent, and I try not to drown.
After dinner, I need a moment. I’m too…
Too full. Too wired. Too everything.
I need air.
I snag my denim jacket from the hook by the door, the one I carried out of a life and into a ditch, and slip my arms into it as I step out onto the porch.
The cold hits me like a wall.
The air is clean and biting, the kind that snaps all your loose thoughts into focus.
The storm has quieted some, but snow is still falling in a soft curtain, thick against the dark sky.
It drifts down over the yard, over the fence posts, over the trees along the highway like a blanket pulled up higher.
The porch boards creak under my feet as I move to the railing, my breath puffing out in little white clouds.
It’s… beautiful.
Not city beautiful, with lights and angles and black ice on sidewalks. Wild beautiful. The kind that’s bigger than you and doesn’t care if you’re watching.
For a few seconds, I let myself just exist in it. No wedding. No job. No father’s voice. Just the hush of snow muffling the world and the distant hum of the highway like a heartbeat.
Then, of course, my brain remembers it’s me.
What now? it whispers, relentless. What now, Faith?
You’ve made your mess, it says. You blew up a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding, a six-figure merger, and a perfectly respectable corporate life. You threw your phone into a snowbank and drove a hundred something miles in a dress you can’t even return. Good job. Gold star. Now what?
I grip the railing harder.
Get to Mom’s, I think. That’s step one. Get to Mom’s. Sit at her wobbly kitchen table with the ugly owl clock ticking too loud on the wall, and let her pour coffee into the chipped mug that says “World’s Okayest Mom.” Breathe. Cry. Maybe sleep for fourteen hours.
And then?
The edge of the porch railing bites into my palms. The cold sneaks under my jacket, up my sleeves, down the back of my neck.
My heart is pounding too fast again. My breaths come quicker, shorter.
The snow doesn’t feel soft anymore; it’s closing in, like somebody whispered that there’s no path out of this white, and it believed them.
“What do you want?” my brain demands, loud and insistent, an event client who’s decided to change everything the week of the gala. “What do you want?”
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I have spent years answering to everybody else’s wants. My father’s. Evan’s. The company’s. The clients’. I know what they want. I don’t know what I want.
Except… I want to breathe.
I want to stop feeling I’m about to be scolded every time my phone buzzes.
I want to wake up and not immediately run a mental checklist of all the ways I’m about to fail publicly.
I want…
My vision blurs around the edges. My fingers go tingly on the railing. My chest tightens, that awful, familiar vise clamping down. Panic has learned this route in my body too well lately—it hits the on-ramp with frightening efficiency.
“No,” I whisper. “No, not again. Not now.”
My thoughts start to spiral anyway, spinning out into worst-case scenarios, a too-fast car hitting ice.
You’re going to ruin everything. You’re already in the way. They’re being nice because that’s who they are, not because you deserve it. You’re going to hurt Dallas. You’re going to be a terrible influence on his daughter. You’re going to…
“Faith.”
The sound of my name is low and close and decidedly not inside my own head.
I flinch.
Warmth wraps around me from behind. Solid and sure. Strong arms slide around my middle, one across my ribs, the other anchoring low at my waist. A chest presses against my back, solid as the porch itself. Heat seeps through my jacket, burning away some of the cold.
“It’s okay,” Dallas murmurs, right by my ear. “You’re okay. Breathe.”
For half a second, my brain panics louder.
Being held is not neutral, not from him.
It’s not a casual hug from an event coordinator after a successful gala or a stiff pat on the shoulder from my father after a “job well done.” It’s…
everything. It’s the past and the present and every version of me that ever thought his arms were the safest place on earth, all stacked on top of each other.
My shoulders sag back into his chest, seeking his warmth like a magnet. My fingers, white-knuckled on the railing, loosen a fraction.
“Can’t…” I manage. “Can’t get it to stop.”
“I know,” he says. “I’ve got you. Just listen to my breathing, okay?”
I try.
He takes slow, even breaths, in through his nose, out through his mouth. I feel each expansion against my back, each exhale brushing the side of my neck. My own breaths stumble, awkward and too fast, but after a few rounds, some of them start to sync up.
In. Out. In. Out.
The snow keeps falling, hushed and relentless. The highway hums softly beyond the tree line, distant—it’s decided to give me space.
“There you go,” he murmurs when my inhale doesn’t snag halfway. “That’s it.”
“What are you doing out here?” I ask after a minute.
“Not letting you freeze to death,” he says. “Mom would kill me.”
“Pretty sure your mom could take Death in a fistfight,” I say weakly.
“Probably,” he agrees. “But I don’t feel like testing the theory tonight.”
His arms tighten, just a fraction, like he’s worried the wind might carry me off if he doesn’t.
The panic ebbs, slowly, reluctantly. My pulse is still too fast, but it’s no longer trying to beat its way out of my chest. The fringe of my fear recedes enough that I can feel other things.
Like the way his thumbs are rubbing small circles against my ribs through my jacket, absent and soothing.
Like the fact that his chin is resting against the top of my head now, his beard just barely scraping my scalp through my hair.