Page 74 of Back to You
I buried my face into his chest, the scent of cedar-wood and warmth and home filling my senses, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough.
The Rolling Pin was still behind me, full of light, full of life—but she wasn’t here to see it. She would never see it. She would never see me. A fresh wave of grief slammed into me, brutal and merciless.
Sebastian held me tighter, his own breath uneven as he whispered, “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so, so sorry.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except sob into his arms, letting the pain tear me apart.
Grief is a strange thing.
It doesn’t arrive all at once. It doesn’t hit in one clean wave. It seeps in, little by little, until it’s everywhere. At first, I felt numb. A cold, empty void stretching inside me, swallowing everything in its path.
I went through the motions. Answered phone calls I barely remembered. Nodded through conversations I didn’t hear. Let Anna and Analyse take over planning the funeral because I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
The Rolling Pin still smelled like coconut and vanilla, but it was all wrong now. I hated it. I hated that life just kept going when it felt like mine was over.
That customers still came in, their voices too bright, too alive. That the world didn’t pause, didn’t acknowledge that something inside me had been ripped out. That I was walking around with a hole in my chest that nothing could fill.
The exhaustion started creeping in a few days later. The deep, aching kind. The type of exhaustion that settled in my bones and refused to leave. It wasn’t just the grief—it was my body turning against me, flaring in protest of everything I’d been forcing it to endure.
My joints stiffened, the dull throbbing in my hands and knees intensifying with every sleepless night, every moment spent curled up on my couch instead of moving, eating,existing. But even when the pain became impossible to ignore, it still wasn’t the worst of it.
Because, for once, my chronic illness wasn’t the cause of my suffering. The grief was worse. It was heavier. It was all-consuming.
Sebastian kept calling. Kept texting. At first, I ignored them all. Then, when I finally picked up, I gave clipped answers.
“I’m fine.”
“I just need some space.”
“I have a lot to do.”
I could hear the worry in his voice, the way he hesitated every time I cut the conversation short. The way he didn’t know how to fix this.
He came by twice. The first time, I let the phone ring until it stopped. Ignored the knock at my door. Ignored the ache in my chest when I heard his voice on the other side, soft and careful, as if saying my name too loudly might make me break.
The second time, he got inside. I don’t know if Anna let him in or if he still had the same spare key from when he helped with the bakery’s renovations.
But when I turned the corner from the kitchen, there he was. Standing in my living room, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, his brown eyes tight with something between worry and panic. I froze. He looked at me like he was afraid I was already gone.
“Hey,” he said, his voice too gentle. Too careful.
I swallowed hard, arms crossing over my chest. “Sebastian, I?—”
“You don’t have to say anything.” He took a hesitant step forward, then stopped. “I just…I don’t want you to be alone.”
My throat burned. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t alone—that I had Anna, and Analyse, and Ruth, and everyone else who had surrounded me these past few days.
But none of them werehim, and that scared me. Because if I let him in, it would hurt more when I lost him, too.
So I shook my head. “I just…need time, Seb.”
His jaw tightened. “You’ve been shutting me out.”
I swallowed. “I’m fine.”
His eyes flashed with something close to frustration. “No, you’re not.”
My fingers curled into fists at my sides. “What do you want me to say? That I’m falling apart? That I feel like I can’t breathe most days? That I wake up and, for a second, forget she’s gone, and then it hits me all over again?”
