Building My Life Novels & Stories

I need to decide whether to sell it or rebuild, but I’m leaning more towards rebuilding. I don’t want the first place I felt at home to be left as a bad memory. I want to start anew and build a life together with Adrian, Hailey and this new baby, in a space that was built by us from the ground up. I just haven't decided if I'm fully ready yet. “So, where are we going?” I asked when I noticed we were heading in the opposite direction of Taco Bell. “Somewhere special,” he smirks at me, reaching over and caressing my knee.

It was the fact that Walter knew I wouldn’t leave. Not this time. I set my phone down, inhaling deeply, fighting to steady my pulse. I wouldn’t be bullied. I wouldn’t let this man, or anyone else, push me out of my life. I had built everything from scratch. My business. My reputation. My home. But as I sat there, staring into the dimly lit living room, the ache in my chest was undeniable. Because I hadn’t just built this life for myself. I had built it for Nathan.

It was something you built yourself—brick by brick—with your own hands. In my past life, I died miserably. In this life, when I could build a legacy with my own strength, I no longer needed to look up to anyone. I had become the person people dreamed of marrying.

Raymond gave me a soft nod, encouraging. “I’ve spent so long rebuilding pieces of my past,” I said, “from the ashes of Montego to the risks with Sanborn, to recovering after the baby and learning to breathe again. But I realized—I don’t want to spend the rest of my life chasing what was. I want to build what can be or what is already.” Rachel leaned forward. Beatrice’s eyes sparkled knowingly.

I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know what career I want.” I laughed weakly. “I don’t even know what country I want to live in.” I don’t know anything about myself and I hadn’t made up my mind on the kind of life i want to live. My fingers tightened around the phone. “The only thing I know is that I spent so much time building my life around you that I forgot how to build one for myself.” The room fell silent. I wasn’t even sure where those words had come from.

"You learned. You grew. You discovered what you don't want. What you won't compromise. That's valuable. That matters. Now you're here. Now you're home. Now you get to build something real. Something honest. Something that actually helps instead of controls." "How?" Phoenix asked. "How do I build anything when I'm twenty-one with nothing?" "Same way we all did," I said. "One choice at a time. One day at a time. One moment at a time. You start where you are. With what you have. With family supporting you. And you build." "I don't know what to build," Phoenix admitted.

We really built a life. This isn't the filtered, pristine kind I*******m shows you, where everyone is bathed in perfect light and children never wear mismatched shoes. This life is real. It’s tired. It’s lived-in. It’s stained with juice and smudged with finger paint and worn down by constant use. It is built from the ground up by two people who had every reason to quit—two people scarred by their own pasts—but who chose to double down on each other instead.

When he asked it, it was because he genuinely wanted to know and he'd assessed that I had the language for it. I thought about it. "Like the building is real," I said. "Not just the framework or the pack or the community center. The house. The specific house with the specific people in it. Every choice I've made in the last two years has been oriented toward building something real. And this — the pregnancy, the third child, the name Luna's already chosen—" I paused. "This is the building being real. This is the confirmation that what we built is the kind of thing that continues. That generates the next thing."

With the understanding that things grow when you show up for them. I sit on the back porch and I watch him work and I understand that this is what comes after the transformation. This is the life that you build once you've done the work to become someone capable of building it. This is the house that you can finally relax in because you've earned the right to relax. Should we build something new? Or does this feel like home enough? The answer is yes to both. We're building something new in this house. A different chapter. A different iteration of the life we've created. But it's also home enough. It's finally the place that feels like it belongs to us in a way that the penthouse never quite

"Now I keep building my life. And we see if he can build himself into someone who fits in it." "That's very zen of you." "Or very scared. I can't tell the difference anymore.”