But every word gets stuck behind a lifetime ofYou should know by now. You should be further along. You should have a plan.
Dallas rescues me.
“Right now,” he says calmly, “she wants to eat her dinner. That’s enough.”
Everyone looks at him.
His gaze stays on Ellie.
“Sometimes ‘right now’ is plenty,” he adds. “Grown-ups forget that.”
Ellie considers this, then nods very seriously.
“Okay,” she says. “After dinner, we can make plans. I’ll help.”
I let out a breath that has been trapped in my lungs since I sat down.
Dallas’s thigh brushes mine under the table as he shifts back in his chair. My whole body is aware of the contact in a way that makes me want to stand up and walk it off.
I don’t.
I sit there and smell Dallas’s cedar and smoke scent, and I try not to drown.
After dinner, I need a moment. I’m too…
Too full. Too wired. Too everything.
I need air.
I snag my denim jacket from the hook by the door, the one I carried out of a life and into a ditch, and slip my arms into it as I step out onto the porch.
The cold hits me like a wall.
The air is clean and biting, the kind that snaps all your loose thoughts into focus. The storm has quieted some, but snow is still falling in a soft curtain, thick against the dark sky. It drifts down over the yard, over the fence posts, over the trees along the highway like a blanket pulled up higher.
The porch boards creak under my feet as I move to the railing, my breath puffing out in little white clouds.
It’s… beautiful.
Not city beautiful, with lights and angles and black ice on sidewalks. Wild beautiful. The kind that’s bigger than you and doesn’t care if you’re watching.
For a few seconds, I let myself just exist in it. No wedding. No job. No father’s voice. Just the hush of snow muffling the world and the distant hum of the highway like a heartbeat.
Then, of course, my brain remembers it’s me.
What now?it whispers, relentless.What now, Faith?
You’ve made your mess, it says. You blew up a hundred-thousand-dollar wedding, a six-figure merger, and a perfectly respectable corporate life. You threw your phone into a snowbank and drove a hundred something miles in a dress you can’t even return. Good job. Gold star. Now what?
I grip the railing harder.
Get to Mom’s, I think. That’s step one. Get to Mom’s. Sit at her wobbly kitchen table with the ugly owl clock ticking too loud on the wall, and let her pour coffee into the chipped mug that says “World’s Okayest Mom.” Breathe. Cry. Maybe sleep for fourteen hours.
And then?
The edge of the porch railing bites into my palms. The cold sneaks under my jacket, up my sleeves, down the back of my neck. My heart is pounding too fast again. My breaths come quicker, shorter. The snow doesn’t feel soft anymore; it’s closing in, like somebody whispered that there’s no path out of this white, and it believed them.
“What do you want?” my brain demands, loud and insistent, an event client who’s decided to change everything the week of the gala. “What do you want?”
