Lahat ng Kabanata ng Destined to Love the Twin Brothers: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

The dinner at Eleanor's arrived two weeks later, delayed slightly to accommodate a work trip of Declan's, and Wren spent the intervening time more nervous than she'd been for almost anything else in this entire complicated situation, more nervous, even, than the conversation with her own mother."You'll be fine," Rory told her, the afternoon of the dinner, sitting across from her at the workshop while she pretended to focus on cabinet hardware and actually just turned the same screw over and over in her hands. "My mother already knows the important part. Tonight's just about her getting to know you as a person, not as a concept.""That's supposed to be reassuring?""A little." He reached over, stilling her hands with his own, warm and steady. "For what it's worth, I think she already likes you. She just doesn't know it yet, because she's been too busy being careful."Eleanor's house was warm and lived in, family photos crowding the hallway walls, the specific clutter of a home that ha

Sophie Lang walked back into the workshop on a Thursday afternoon like she'd never left, her arrival announced by the particular confidence of someone who'd once known this space well enough to consider it partly her own."I heard a rumor," she said, by way of greeting, catching Declan mid conversation with a supplier on the phone. She waited, arms crossed, an old familiarity in her posture that made Wren, watching from across the workshop, feel unexpectedly territorial.Declan finished his call quickly, his expression shifting through surprise and something more complicated once he saw who was waiting for him. "Sophie. It's been a while.""It has." She glanced around the workshop, taking in the space with the specific thoroughness of someone cataloging what had changed since she'd last been welcome here. "I ran into your mother at the market. She mentioned, very carefully, that things have gotten interesting around here." Her eyes landed on Wren, sharp and assessing. "I take it you'r

Nothing dramatic happened on the Saturday six weeks later, and that, Wren thought, driving to Declan's apartment with a bag of groceries in the passenger seat, was exactly the point.The Hendricks fallout had settled into something manageable, two more clients quietly declining future work over the following month, balanced by a handful of new inquiries from people who'd apparently heard about the situation and found themselves more curious than deterred. The business had wobbled, but it hadn't broken, and gradually, the wobbling had steadied into something that felt, if not entirely normal, at least sustainable.Rory was already at Declan's apartment when she arrived, sleeves rolled up, chopping vegetables with the same careful precision he brought to woodworking, while Declan argued with him, cheerfully, about whether the recipe actually needed as much garlic as Rory insisted."She'll back me up," Declan said, as Wren set the groceries down. "Tell him this is too much garlic.""I'm

The article ran two weeks later, a Sunday feature with a photograph of the workshop's skylights and a headline that read, simply, Craft, Family, and an Unconventional Love: The Ashworths Build More Than Furniture.Wren read it standing in her kitchen before work, coffee going cold beside her, and found that Talia had done exactly what she'd promised, a genuinely thoughtful piece that spent most of its length on the craftsmanship, the history of the business, the specific, careful attention that went into every commission. The personal section, when it arrived two thirds of the way through, was handled with the same evenhanded curiosity Talia had shown during the interview itself, quoting all three of them honestly, without sensationalizing the shape of their relationship into something scandalous.It was, by any reasonable measure, a fair piece. That didn't mean the reaction would be fair too.The first responses came within hours of the paper hitting driveways, a mix Wren had braced

The house found them, more than the other way around, a converted farmhouse just outside town that Rory spotted on a listing site during a slow afternoon at the workshop, three bedrooms and a wraparound porch and enough land around it that the nearest neighbor was a comfortable, private distance away."It's not what I pictured," Declan said, standing in the overgrown front yard the following Saturday, the three of them having driven out together to see it in person. "But I think that might be the point."The house was older, in need of real work, the kind of place that would take months of careful renovation before it looked like anything close to finished. But standing in the empty front room, sunlight coming through tall, uneven windows, Wren felt something settle in her chest that she recognized immediately as recognition, the specific, unmistakable feeling of a space that could actually become theirs."I love it," she said, before she'd fully decided to say anything at all."Yeah,