Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself what I wanted and started asking what would make everything easier for everyone else. Easier for Dad. Easier for the business. Easier for the version of me everyone already believed in.
I step off the curb and into the sunlight, the heat pressing against my shoulders like a question I can’t outrun.
What if I don’t want easier anymore?
A life can be good—mine is by certain definitions—but it can still not be right.
For most of my life, or at least the last seven years, I thought being rooted meant staying exactly where you were planted.
But I feel like a flower wilting beneath glass, counting down petals and wondering when the story ends.
What if being rooted really means knowing when it’s time to grow in a new direction—rooted in something other than soil and expectations?
I feel the list in my back pocket, and I smile.
Permission.
Permission to try something new.
Permission to go somewhere else.
Permission to step outside the life that’s already been decided for me.
I turn right, my sandals slapping softly against the pavement, and let permission take me where I need to go next.
25
MILO
The field seems smaller somehowas I walk from one goal post to the other. I grip the football harder in my hands. The last time I was here I thought I knew what mattered most—the game.
It was a chance to prove that not all Carter men were failures. That there was more to my lineage than regret, bad choices, and prison bars.
I learned too late that it wasn’t the game that changed me but a girl.
My eyes widen as I look up and seethatgirl, as if my thoughts have summoned her.
I walk over to the bleachers where she’s sitting, the sun pressing heavy on her bare shoulders. Her red lips spread into a soft smile. “Well, this is weird,” she says.
“What’s weird?” I ask.
“Both of us being back here,” she answers softly. “How’s it feel?” She nods toward the field.
But I don’t really care much about the field.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’ve never played the part of coach. I hope Dusty Hollow knows I’m not the same boy who left all those years ago.”
“Oh, I don’t know. If you squint hard enough, you still look almost eighteen,” she teases. “Same field, same smile, same Milo.”
I climb the two steps and sit beside her on the metal bench. She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and for a moment I just want to freeze time . . . to trace her jaw, pull her close, and breathe her in.
“You know, I didn’t mean to hurt you when I said those words,” I murmur quietly.
“Same books, same cookies, same Sadie?” she asks, and there’s a heaviness to her words, as if each one is weighed down with worries.
“Yeah,” I reply. “I just?—”
“Hadn’t seen your ex-girlfriend for a while and discovered she still read the same books and baked the same cookies and was basically the same Sadie? You weren’t wrong.” She sighs, her gaze toward the field instead of me.
