Page 104 of Back to December
“I didn’t do anything. This is all you.”
I gesture at the scene playing out in the background. “I wouldneverchoose this.”
Holden passes out cups of hot cocoa to the kids, two of them looking startlingly close to Luna and Henry. There are differences, of course, but Sebastian might as well take a knife and stab me.
It would hurt less.
“You didn’t choose at all,” he says calmly.
“But Ididchoose!” My voice breaks with desperation. “I told him I loved him?—”
“Ah, my dear. Wanting isn’t the same as choosing.”
His words hit like a bell in an empty church—clear, echoing, impossible to ignore.
He’s right.
And it makes me feel like I’m suffocating, right here on the lawn of the house that represents the only real physical home I’ve ever had, until my mother took it away.
Holden and I never had a physical home, but his apartment always made me feel the same way. And did I ever tellhim? Did I ever use those words:you’re my home? Or did he just think he was a cycle of nostalgia I clung to when my world was spinning out of control?
I press my hands to my face.
“Yes, you told him you loved him. But Laila,” he says quietly. “You didn’t show him. The walls you keep fortified with fear are strong, and you kept running. You assumed that time was on your side, when really, time doesn’t wait for people to be ready.”
“I needed to find myself first. I needed to build a life without my mother?—”
“And did you?”
Sort of.
But things only click when Holden is there to support me.
“Fear lies. It tells you there will always be more time. Every story ends,” he murmurs. “Even the ones with magic.”
I suppose it should comfort me that there’s an end to all this. But it doesn’t.
When he glances at me, there’s a glint of regret in his eyes.
“Your friend Henry tried to tell you this,” Sebastian says softly. “He’s right, you know. Folklore, the rituals, the stories we tell to make sense of our lives—they exist so we don’t lose ourselves in the chaos.”
Henry’s words echo in my mind. “But sometimes you have to change the ending.”
Sebastian nods. “They grow, they bend. They stop fitting the people who wrote them.”
“Then maybe it’s time to rewrite mine,” I whisper.
He turns back to the picture-perfect Christmas breakfast happening in Ella’s backyard. Holden and my sisters and theentire Jackson family. It’s right in front of me, just out of reach.
“You built something beautiful, but you forgot to let it evolve.”
I thought I was. When we agreed to every six months instead of twelve, Sunday morning brunches. The ten days we spent together in September and October.
Letting it evolve would’ve looked like me staying. Not just building a life for myself that would absorb Holden.
We should’ve built that together.That’sthe ending I’m supposed to change.
“That wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to.” I hiccup back a sob.
