Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
BAILEY
The keys clatter from my trembling fingers as I thrust cash at the Uber driver. Sixteen grueling hours of flying cargo from Denver to Seattle to Phoenix, and all I’ve got to show for it is bloodshot eyes and a gaping wound where my heart used to be.
“Need help with that bag, Miss?” The driver’s voice barely penetrates the fog of my exhaustion.
“No. Thanks. Got it.”
My carry-on drags like it’s packed with bricks as I trudge up the walkway. Gravity itself seems heavier since Chicago.
Three days since I stood outside that restaurant window. Three days since I watched Sebastian smile at Rebecca across a pristine white tablecloth. Three days of flying boxes and crates that don’t notice I’ve gone silent.
My feet scuff the concrete. This isn’t me. I’m Bailey Monroe. I bounce. I chatter. I make strangers regret sitting next to me on planes. That Bailey vanished somewhere over Alaska, left behind in a cabin with the rest of my stupid dreams.
I reach the first step of my building and freeze. Something glints on the sidewalk, catching the streetlight in a way that stops my heart mid-beat.
A snow globe.
My chest clenches as I bend down. Los Angeles skyline, tiny palm trees and all.
I look up.
Another snow globe waits a few feet away. And beyond that, another.
My carry-on crashes to the pavement, forgotten as I move to the next one. Seattle. Space Needle perfect in miniature. Then Phoenix. Denver. New York.
They create a path—glass breadcrumbs leading straight to my door.
My hands tremble as I gather them, cradling the little worlds against my chest like they might shatter if I breathe too hard.
I climb the stairs, arms loaded with as many snow globes as I can hold. Each step reveals more, tucked along the edges of the stairwell. St. Louis. Miami. Boston. Places I’ve flown. Places I’ve only dreamed about.
The higher I climb, the more abundant they become.
They line my hallway floor, creating a shimmering glass galaxy that captures and fractures the flickering hallway lights.
Paris, with its delicate Eiffel Tower. London, with small red phone booths.
Tokyo’s miniature cherry blossoms. Rome’s tiny Colosseum.
Sydney’s opera house captured in perpetual frozen perfection.
My arms can’t hold any more. The globes tumble from my grip as I stoop to pick up Rio de Janeiro, its Christ the Redeemer statue detailed at barely an inch tall. Hundreds of them carpet the hall, each representing somewhere in the world.
My apartment door comes into view, and my lungs stop working.
Sebastian.
He leans against my door wearing jeans and a leather jacket. His perfect hair sticks up in all directions, like he’s been running his hands through it for hours. He looks raw, undone, and so achingly beautiful my ribs feel like they might crack from the pressure building inside them.
This can’t be real. I saw him. At the restaurant. With her.
But there he stands, surrounded by what must be a small fortune in snow globes, creating a glittering pathway that leads to him.
“How?” The word barely escapes my throat. “When did you—”
“Been collecting them.” His voice sounds raw, like he hasn’t slept. “Ever since you left.”
My fingers tighten around Paris, its miniature base digging into my palm. “But I saw you with Rebecca. You were having lunch—”
“Saying goodbye,” he cuts in.
My grip loosens, Paris almost slipping from my hands. “What?”
“That’s what you saw through the window.” Sebastian pushes away from my door, stepping closer. “Rebecca wanted closure. To apologize. I agreed to meet her to end things properly.”
The snow globes in my arms suddenly weigh nothing—or maybe everything. My balance shifts, world tilting sideways.
“I was telling her about the incredible pilot who crash-landed into my ordered life and made everything else I’ve ever known seem hollow and meaningless.”
My throat closes. “You were smiling—”
“Because I was finally free. And in love. With you.”
His words hang between us. I stare down at the collection of miniature worlds in my arms—perfect cities and landmarks, each one contained, predictable, safe.
Unlike my heart, which performs gymnastic routines that defy every law of physics.
“You left this.” He holds up the Chicago snow globe I abandoned outside that restaurant. “You disappeared before you could see me run after you.”
My airway constricts. My brain short-circuits at the sight of him holding the very globe I set down as my final goodbye.
“Sebastian—”
“No. My turn to talk.”
He takes another step.
“You ran,” he continues, voice dropping lower. “So I followed. To Seattle. Denver. Phoenix. Every city your company said you might be in. I’ve slept in airports for three days straight.”
The strange looks from my supervisor yesterday suddenly make perfect sense. Those knowing smiles from the ground crew. They knew. Every last one of them knew he was hunting for me across the country.
“I bought one for every city I searched.” He gestures to the hallway of globes, hundreds of them glittering like fallen stars.
“Then I bought every single one I could find in every shop in every city and chartered a plane to fly them here before you returned.”
My eyes sweep across the hundreds of snow globes, transforming my dingy hallway into a magical wonderland—places I’ve never even dreamed of visiting.
“I haven’t been to half these places,” I whisper, voice shrinking in the narrow hallway.
Sebastian moves closer, taking Paris from my trembling hands and setting it with the others. His fingers brush against mine, sending electricity crackling up my arm and straight to my thundering heart.
“I know.” His eyes lock onto mine, unwavering. “You collect moments, Bailey. These are all the moments I want with you. We can make those ours.”
My ribcage tightens as I survey the glittering path he’s created. Each globe a promise, each miniature world an invitation.
“It’s a lot,” I manage, emotion strangling my words.
His smile—genuine and unguarded, nothing like the polished mask he wore when we first met—makes my pulse stutter.
“And I want you in every single one,” Sebastian says, close enough now that his warmth radiates against my skin.
“But I pushed you away,” I whisper. “Said terrible things.”
“Then you came looking for me.” He moves even closer. “Why did you come to Chicago, Bailey?”
The question suspends between us. Why did I?
My mind spins with a thousand answers—each true, each terrifying. Because sleep became impossible. Because breathing hurt. Because the sky stretches empty when he’s not watching me fly.
My mouth opens, but nothing emerges. Words jam in my throat, trapped behind years of hearing I’m too much, too loud, too everything. For once in my life, language abandons me.
Sebastian watches me struggle, eyes softening with understanding. Without a word, he reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out another snow globe.
This one stands apart from the others. Smaller. No city name carved into its base.
He places it in my hands with such care, and I feel its weight—heavier than expected, like it contains something precious.
Inside, nestled in perfect white powder, sits a tiny cabin.
Not some famous landmark or skyline, but a snow-covered log cabin with a tin chimney and miniature tools hanging from its sides.
Two tiny figures stand in the clearing, detailed enough that I almost recognize their faces.
In the distance, barely visible among the miniature pines, four wolves watch from the tree line.
My breath catches. Our cabin. Our wolves. Our moment.
“Because some moments change everything,” Sebastian says.
Tears blur the glass dome as I stare at our story, preserved forever. The cabin where we fought wolves, built Christmas trees, and found each other despite our best efforts not to.
I swallow hard, cradling our miniature world.
“You can’t just—” My voice cracks. The cabin snow globe trembles in my hands, its tiny figures watching us with microscopic hope. “Your family—”
“Know exactly where I am. And who I’m choosing.” Sebastian never blinks, never looks away. The harsh hallway light reveals shadows beneath his eyes—matching the sleepless nights stamped under mine.
“Sebastian...” His name breaks in my throat, half-plea, half-prayer. The snow globes surrounding us catch the light, casting rainbows across the walls, across his face, across the impossible choice he’s making.
“I choose you, Bailey Monroe. Every city. Every flight. Every snow globe. Every imperfect, chaotic, beautiful moment.” His voice remains steady, certain in a way that liquifies my knees.
“I’m still too much.” But I’m moving toward him, drawn to him.
“You once told me you wished to be someone’s priority,” he says, voice dropping low enough that I have to lean closer to hear. “That you wanted someone who’d clear their schedule when you land—not because they remembered you exist, but because they couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
My breath catches. He remembered. Every word.
“I’ve spent my life prioritizing everything but what matters,” Sebastian continues. “But now? I’ll drop board meetings to meet your plane. I’ll check flight trackers hourly. I’ll wait at terminals just to be the first face you see stepping off the jetway.”
His fingers brush a strand of hair behind my ear, and I’m undone.
“You’ll never have to feel selfish for wanting that again, Bailey. Because loving you isn’t an obligation I schedule, it’s the only thing that makes all the rest of it worth doing.”
“We’ll crash and burn.” I whisper the warning.
“Good thing you’re a pilot.” The corner of his mouth lifts—that half-smile that short-circuits my ability to form coherent thoughts.
“I’ll never fit in your world.” My final defense crumbles as I take another step, close enough to feel his body heat, to catch the cedar notes of his cologne.
“Then we’ll build our own. One city at a time. One snow globe at a time.”
“This is crazy,” I whisper against his coat as my free hand fingers curl into the soft leather.
Sebastian’s arms wrap around me, pulling me close.
“Says the woman who survived wolves and my mother in the same month.”
His voice rumbles through his chest and into mine. The vibrations travel deeper, settling somewhere in the middle. I tilt my face up, still disbelieving he’s here, surrounded by hundreds of glass dreams.
“Your mother still hates me.”
The memory flashes—her perfect pearls and horrified expression when Sebastian mentioned “the pilot.” The woman who raised him to be flawless, to marry flawlessly, to live flawlessly—confronted with messy, chatty, snow-globe-obsessed me.
Sebastian’s smile softens, eyes crinkling at the corners. “She’ll learn to love you. Or we’ll convert her mansion into the world’s largest snow globe museum.”
The absurdity—his proper mother with tourist trinkets cluttering her perfect mansion—bubbles a laugh from my throat. But it emerges choked, wet, because something expands in my chest, something too vast and raw to contain.
My vision swims with tears I can no longer hold back. “You’ve broken the cardinal rule of aviation,” I manage between shaky breaths.
“Which is?”
“Never make the pilot cry during landing.”
His thumb catches a tear on my cheek, brushing it away with a tenderness that only triggers more. Sebastian’s touch burns warm against my skin, his gaze never wavering as his hand cups my face.
“We’re not landing. We’re taking off.”
Here we stand in a hallway transformed into a universe of miniature worlds, yet somehow the only world that matters is the vanishing space between his lips and mine.
“Sebastian?”
“Hmm?”
“Shut up and kiss me before I remember all the reasons this is crazy.”