Chapter 16 #2
Showing up mattered. Being reliable mattered. But somewhere along the way, I’d confused being useful with being loved. I’d convinced myself that if I just kept appearing—kept fixing things, kept making myself available—eventually someone would choose me.
That wasn’t how it worked.
You couldn’t earn love by being convenient. You could only be yourself and hope someone wanted that. Wanted you. Not the version that made their life easier, but the real, complicated person underneath.
Grace wanted me.
Not because I fixed her porch steps or built her a nursery. Not because I showed up every Saturday for sixteen years. Not because I was safe or reliable or easy to have around.
She wanted me because of who I was. Because I’d never asked her to be smaller. Because I loved her in a way that made her feel more like herself, not less.
That was the difference. That was everything.
Grace’s hand found my knee somewhere along the winding road. I covered it with mine and laced our fingers together. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t need to.
The B&B appeared around the final bend—a white Victorian with a wraparound porch, the house I’d been coming to since I was eighteen. I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine.
The morning light was full now, warm through the windshield.
“Ready?” I asked.
She turned to me and smiled. “Yeah. I’m ready.”
I got out, walked around to her side, and opened her door. Helped her out the way I would have done anyway, pregnant or not. But this time, when she was standing, she didn’t let go of my hand.
“So,” she said. “What now?”
“Now we go inside,” I said. “And you make me coffee that’s too sweet. And I pretend to like it.”
Grace laughed. “You’ve been pretending all these years?”
“Sixteen years of too-sweet coffee, Grace. Yes. I’ve been pretending.”
She shook her head, still laughing. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you made it for me.” I lifted our joined hands and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “That was enough.”
Her expression shifted—something tender and aching.
“I’m going to make you coffee you actually like,” she said. “From now on.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” She tugged me toward the porch steps. “I want to know what you actually like. Not what you tolerate because you think that’s what love means.”
I stopped walking and pulled her back toward me.
“Grace.”
She looked up at me. Patient. Waiting.
“I don’t need you to change anything,” I said.
“I didn’t fall in love with you because of small things like coffee.
I fell in love with you because you’re you.
The way you hum when you knead dough. The way you talk to your grandmother’s portrait when you think no one’s listening.
The way you run this place like it’s a living thing that needs tending.
” I cupped her face in my hands. “I don’t want a different version of you. I just want you to let me in.”
Her eyes filled.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I can do that.”
I kissed her forehead. Then her nose. Then her mouth—slow and deliberate.
The baby kicked between us again. Grace laughed against my lips.
“She’s impatient,” Grace said.
“She’s her mother’s daughter.”
Grace swatted my arm, but she was grinning. “Come on. I’ll make you terrible coffee, and you can tell me about all the things you’ve been pretending to like for sixteen years.”
“It’s a long list.”
“We’ve got time.”
She took my hand and led me up the porch steps, into the house I’d loved almost as long as I’d loved her. The screen door creaked the way it always did. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon, like always.
But something was different.
This time, I wasn’t visiting. I wasn’t helping out. I wasn’t hovering on the edges of her life, waiting to be invited in.
This time, I was home.
The following Saturday morning unfolded the way Saturday mornings always had—except for everything that was different.
Grace made coffee. I sat at the kitchen table and watched her move through the space the way I’d watched her a thousand times before. But this time, when she caught me looking, she smiled instead of glancing away. This time, when she set the mug in front of me, her hand lingered on my shoulder.
“I put less sugar,” she said. “Tell me if it’s still too sweet.”
I took a sip. It was still too sweet—but closer. Progress.
“It’s good.”
“Liar.”
“It’s getting there.”
She laughed and lowered herself into the chair across from me.
“What are you going to tell Marcus?” I asked.
Grace’s smile faded slightly—not with regret, but with resolution.
“The truth,” she said. “That I’m not going to marry him.
That I should have told him that years ago, before I spent so long trying to be the person he wanted me to be.
” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “He’ll want to be involved with the baby.
He should be. She’s his daughter. But he and I—” She shook her head.
“We were over a long time ago. I was just too afraid to admit it.”
“And the B&B?”
“What about it?”
“It’s a lot,” I said. “Running this place, raising a baby. I don’t want you to—” I stopped, then started again. “I want to help. Not because I’m trying to be useful. Because this place matters to you, which means it matters to me.”
Grace reached across the table and took my hand.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m not scared anymore.”
The morning light spilled through the kitchen windows. The clock ticked above the stove—the same clock that had been there since her grandmother’s time. The house settled around us, old bones creaking.
I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles.
Sixteen years of Saturday mornings.
And finally, I was exactly where I belonged.