Semua Bab The Billionaire's Runaway Country Girl : Bab 41 - Bab 50

Jules' POVI drove back into Millhaven on a Thursday in mid-December, alone, leaving Eli with Adam and Madeline at the house for the afternoon, because there was a conversation I needed to have in person and a phone call would have been a kind of cowardice I wasn't willing to commit.George had texted me twice in the six weeks since the fire — once to ask if we were all okay, a short message with no expectation attached, and once, three weeks later, to say he'd heard from the building manager that our apartment was being repaired and he hoped that meant good things. I had answered both messages but I hadn't told him where we'd gone or why or what had changed. It had felt, at the time, like information that wasn't mine alone to share. Now it felt like a debt I owed him directly.He answered his door in a flour-dusted apron, which made the whole thing harder in a way I hadn't anticipated. He was testing a new recipe — something with a lattice crust, half-assembled on the counter behind

Jules' POVI wrote the letter on a Tuesday in late January, sitting at the library desk with the snow coming down outside the tall windows and Dorian's handwriting from the dinner invitation still tucked into the drawer where I kept the things that mattered.Nana's grave had numbers carved into the headstone that I had memorized as a child without understanding why — she had told me once, half-distracted, half-serious in the way she sometimes was when the dementia had her standing at the edge of a memory she couldn't quite step into, that if I ever needed help and couldn't reach her, I should write to the numbers. I had assumed, for years, that this was a confused old woman's instruction, a fragment of something that no longer connected to anything real. I had filed it away the same place I filed all of her stranger moments — with tenderness, but without literal weight.It had not been confused at all.The numbers were a postal box. Dorian's postal box, the one secure channel that had

Adam's POVHe had started planning the proposal in February, which felt, in retrospect, like exactly the wrong season to start planning anything that involved a ring and a field and the particular quality of light he had in mind — but he had learned, over the past several months, that the things worth doing right were rarely convenient, and he had decided he was done choosing convenience over correctness.The ring itself had taken six weeks.He had gone to three jewelers before he found the right one — a small, independent craftsman two states over who worked almost exclusively by commission and had a reputation, among the very specific circle of people who cared about such reputations, for being able to translate an idea into a physical object with an accuracy that bordered on unsettling. Adam had sat across from the man, whose name was Elias, in a workshop that smelled of metal and polish, and had tried to describe what he wanted."I don't want something large," he'd said. "I don't

Jules' POVMadeline's reaction to the engagement was loud enough that Victor fled the kitchen entirely and did not reappear for the rest of the afternoon, which I considered a fully reasonable response on the cat's part.She had been at the kitchen table grading a stack of student art portfolios when I came down, still in my pajamas, cold-addled hair a wreck, and held out my hand without saying anything because I genuinely did not trust my voice. She looked up, looked at my face, looked at my hand, and made a sound I had never heard a grown woman make before — somewhere between a shriek and a sob, entirely without dignity, completely without restraint."HE DID IT," she said. "HE FINALLY DID IT.""You knew?""Jules. Jules. He asked me three weeks ago what your ring size was. I told him I'd find out without you noticing. I have been waiting three weeks to lose my mind about this and you have no idea what that has cost me.""You knew for three weeks and didn't say anything?""I'm an exce

~ ~ ~Jules' POVThe garden had been Madeline's idea originally — a small plot behind the kitchen, nothing ambitious, just a few raised beds where Eli could plant things and watch them grow, the kind of project meant to give a restless four-year-old something productive to focus his enormous energy on during the long stretch of spring afternoons. It had become, over the months, something larger than any of us had intended.I found myself out there most mornings now, kneeling in dirt that had become genuinely familiar to my hands in a way that surprised me — the particular satisfaction of working soil, of watching something respond to careful attention, that I hadn't experienced since Nana's garden, since the farm, since a version of my life I had believed was permanently behind me.Eli's section was chaos, by design. He had insisted on planting things in patterns that made sense only to him — a row of carrots interrupted by a single sunflower seed he'd insisted needed to be "in charge