Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
ROBYN
What do you actually want, Robyn?
Robyn kept repeating Tyler’s question. The chai had gone lukewarm, Mr. Darcy had migrated from the armchair to her feet and back to the armchair again, the manuscript had been open on the same page for twenty minutes, and she could still hear Tyler’s voice asking her the one question she’d been successfully avoiding for months.
She knew what she wanted. Truly.
She wanted to save the bookshop. She wanted Tyler and Emma—this almost-family, this home she hadn’t expected. And she wanted to keep her career, too. She wanted to teach. She wanted to build something meaningful. She wanted to be proud of the life she built.
Robyn exhaled, setting her tea down with careful hands.
One thing at a time.
Tonight, she didn’t have to solve her entire future. She didn’t have to untangle Yale and Maple Falls and her parents and every terrifying unknown.
She just had to do one thing.
She had to finish Isabel’s story.
Robyn reread the final installment again, slower this time. Letting herself sink into Isabel’s voice.
And then Robyn opened a fresh document. Her fingers hovered for a beat.
She imagined Isabel in her mind, trusting her words to paper the way you trusted a secret to someone you loved.
Robyn swallowed. Then she started typing. At first, it was halting. She typed one sentence, then another, then a backspace, then a rewrite.
But slowly, the rhythm returned. Her characters started talking, and they had a lot to say. The romance beat in Robyn’s chest like a second heartbeat. She stopped thinking about the town and the expectations and the judgment and started thinking about the story—what it needed, what it deserved.
What Isabel had been asking for all along.
Hours passed without her noticing. The tea went cold. Her laptop warmed her thighs. Outside the loft window, Maple Falls sank deeper into night.
When she finally typed the last line, her heart fluttered. Robyn sat back, blinking at the screen. She’d done it. She’d finished the story.
Then she saved the file twice, because yeah, that’s happened before.
She climbed into bed sometime before 4 a.m., mind still buzzing, the final line looping through her thoughts like a lullaby she couldn’t stop humming.
Three hours later, she woke with a start, heart racing, as if her body had remembered she was on a deadline. Robyn padded back to the couch, hair a mess, eyes gritty, and reopened the document.
She reread the ending. Once, and then twice, and then sent it off to Tyler for him to work his magic.
She’d played her part; now she needed to make sure the event went beautifully—because perhaps, among the guests, there would be the perfect buyer.