I hit the cutoff and make the hardest turn of my life, tires skidding just enough to leave a mark on the empty road.
She’s going back to Winslow Grove.
I don’t know why, and I don’t need to yet—I just need to get there before she changes her mind.
I’m not letting her go.
Not again.
Not this time.
Chapter39
Grace
My vision blurs, and I swipe at my eyes, annoyed more than alarmed until I realize I’m crying.Actual tears, spilling fast enough that the road doubles and bends in front of me.
My grip on the steering wheel tightens as my insides shudder, breath stuttering, and before I can talk myself out of it, I’m near sobbing.
I guide the rental onto the shoulder and throw it into park, my hands shaking as I lean forward, forehead dropping to the steering wheel.This doesn’t happen to me.I don’t unravel like this.
Not since?—
But something inside me has split open, and I can’t hold it together long enough to pretend I’m fine.The sound that escapes my throat is raw and foreign, torn straight from the place I keep locked down.
My shoulders hitch as everything I didn’t say, didn’t ask for, didn’t allow myself to hope for comes crashing in all at once.Maddox didn’t just see me—hemetme.
Steady, patient, unassuming Maddox, who never pushed but somehow got closer than anyone ever has.Who made space for me without making me feel weak for taking it and who listened like what I said mattered, likeImattered.
And then he turned his back on me, both figuratively and literally.
The grief of it burns, surprising in its intensity.I trusted him and thought he would keep me safe, and I don’t offer pieces of myself easily or carelessly.
I let the reality of that hurt, let it settle into my chest and work its way into my bones, because pretending it doesn’t matter would be a lie.I press my palms to my eyes and breathe through the sting of it, through the loss of it.
He’s a good man.
The best I’ve ever known, maybe.
And he’s flawed, but who isn’t?And who among us hasn’t let fear ride shotgun when we should have kicked fear to the curb and taken the wheel?
That truth lands quietly but solidly.Maddox isn’t cruel, he isn’t careless, and he wasn’t playing games.He was scared for his family, for the quiet life he’s built here, for everything he’s already lost.He couldn’t stand to lose again, and oh, how I get that.
On the cusp of being a man, his life and future as he knew them ended with the death of his father.Then he chooses a path to fix things for his family, no matter what he may really want, only to find heartache and strife.
And then there was me.
All he could see was that I had the power to take it all away, everything he thought he was gaining with his second chance in Winslow Grove.
That fear has been running underneath us since we met that first afternoon in the Grill, an undercurrent I felt but couldn’t name.
I name it now.
And now, the idea of driving away—for real this time—feels unbearable in a way I didn’t expect when I packed my suitcase and left the inn.
I lift my head and stare through the windshield at the road stretching forward in the direction I was so certain I needed to go.It would be easy to leave.But I want this man more than I want my life back in Los Angeles, and that’s not a small thing to admit.The job is replaceable.The apartment is replaceable.The careful, self-sufficient existence I built around never needing anything I couldn’t provide for myself—replaceable.
He isn’t.
