Out of the Woods E-Book

Hannah Bonam-Young

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Erotik
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Absolute, utter perfection' Chloe Liese, bestselling author of Only and Forever 'Real and raw...swoon-worthy romance.' Bal Khabra A married couple joins a week-long wilderness expedition to help them reconnect in this heartfelt companion novel to the viral TikTok sensation Out on a Limb. High school sweethearts Sarah and Caleb Linwood have always been a sure thing. For the past seventeen years, they have had each other's backs through all of life's ups and downs. But Sarah has begun to wonder... who is she without her other half? When she decides to take on a fundraiser in memory of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove that she doesn't need Caleb's help to succeed. But the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day. The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances and doubts. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be? Desperate to save what they know they once had, Sarah and Caleb join a grueling, week-long hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches. Can they fight their way out of the woods in order to find their way back to their roots?

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Praise for Hannah Bonam-Young

‘Warm, sexy, and vulnerable . . . Hannah Bonam-Young needs to be on your romance radar’

Hannah Grace, author of Icebreaker on Next to You

‘Funny and huge-hearted and romantic and real’

Talia Hibbert, author of Get a Life, Chloe Brown on

Next of Kin

‘Tender, thoughtful, and deeply touching’

Chloe Liese, author of Two Wrongs Make a Right on

Next of Kin

‘Phenomenal, adorable, sexy and romantic, hilarious, gasp-inducing! I will never be over it!’

Clare Gilmore, author of Love Interest on Next to You

‘You know when you read a book and it feels like there’s a fist around your heart and your stomach drops and your throat goes tight? Everyone needs to pay attention. Hannah is going to do incredible things’

B.K. Borison, author of Lovelight Farms on

Out on a Limb

OUT OF THE WOODS

Hannah Bonam-Young

For Abi, for not letting it break you.

And, for all my fellow Amy March girls out there.

You don’t have to be great or nothing.

You can just be.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WELCOME BACK, FRIENDS.

Out of the Woods is an interconnected stand-alone set after book one, Out on a Limb. Sarah and Caleb are the “happily” married best friends to Win and Bo, book one’s protagonists. I’d suggest reading Out on a Limb first, but you absolutely don’t have to, to enjoy Out of the Woods.

Win and Bo, from Out on a Limb, will always be incredibly special to me. They launched my career in a big way, and I poured so much of myself into their love story—my disability, my experience of motherhood, and many pieces of my own love story. I had told myself that I’d write one deeply vulnerable book, hope for the best, and leave it at that. I had believed that I’d be better off closing my bleeding heart before I poured it out on page again . . . but then along came Sarah and Caleb.

My husband, Ben, and I began dating in high school and got married when I was eighteen. Which, in hindsight, is a batshit thing to do. Thankfully, we’re still happily together. Not without effort. Not without painful lessons. Not without struggle. But ultimately, I’m lucky to say that I’m married to my best friend. There’s no one else whom I’d rather spend time with. No other person can make me laugh harder or make me feel safer. We were just among the lucky (and not-so-lucky) few who met their person a little too young—which is the inspiration for this novel.

Out of the Woods is my love letter to all of us who met their soulmate before they had the chance to fully meet themselves. I wanted to write a story that reflected the delicate dance of being madly, deeply in love with your significant other but desperately seeking independence, evolution, and change.

It’s also for all of us who, following a traumatic event, felt frozen in time.

Sarah and Caleb have been together for more than half of their lives by the time we meet them in Out of the Woods. Their love story is one filled with hopefulness, familiarity, inside jokes, shared history, grief, friendship, and intimacy. I hope you love them as much as I do.

—HANNAH BONAM-YOUNG

Content Warnings:

• Death of a parent from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)

• Medical treatments, illness, hospitalization, terminal diagnosis

• Questioning religious practices/spirituality, Catholicism

• References to alcohol and marijuana consumption

• Descriptive sex scenes

• Accident resulting in hospitalization

“You find the path by walking it.”

—MAYA ANGELOU

Contents

Cover

Praise for Hannah Bonam-Young

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Seventeen Years Ago

One: Present Day

Sixteen Years Ago

Two

Three: Three Weeks Later

Fifteen Years Ago

Four

Fifteen Years Ago

Five: Day One of Reignite

Fourteen Years Ago

Six

Seven

Fourteen Years Ago

Eight

Fourteen Years Ago

Nine: Day Two of Reignite

Fourteen Years Ago

Ten

Fourteen Years Ago

Eleven

Twelve: Day Three of Reignite

Thirteen

Fourteen

Thirteen Years Ago

Fifteen

Twelve Years Ago

Sixteen

Twelve Years Ago

Seventeen

Eighteen

Eleven Years Ago

Nineteen: Day Four of Reignite

Twenty

Twenty-One: Day Five of Reignite

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Epilogue: Ten Years Later

Acknowledgments

Also by Hannah Bonam-Young

About the Author

Keep Reading . . .

Copyright

About the Publisher

SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO

“SARAH!” WIN’S VOICE COMES AROUND THE CORNER OF the school’s hallway before the rest of her follows. She’s running faster than I’ve ever seen her move—outside of a swimming pool that is. “Would you please get out of the way?” she shrieks at a pair of seniors who seem about ready to dry hump each other, parting them as Moses did the Red Sea as she continues running like a puppet freed from its strings.

“What on earth . . .” I say, just as she, panting, stops and bends over to catch her breath in front of me. “Are you okay?”

“We really need to stop faking our periods to get out of gym class.” She straightens, placing a hand on her heaving chest. “Coach Smith is right; cardio is important. I will not make it past tryouts if—”

I hold my right hand out to silence her, reach into my locker for my inhaler, and present it to her with an open palm.

“I’m good.” She shakes her head, slowing her breaths as she moves to lean against the row of lockers next to mine. “Plus, we both know that thing expired in middle school.”

“Mom says that expiration dates are a tool from the government to take more of our money and limit resources.” I toss my inhaler into the abyss behind the neat row of library books that sit front and center. What lies beyond those books is no longer my concern. At this rate the inhaler’s fall is probably cushioned by hundreds of discarded gum wrappers and abandoned scrunchies.

Win nods slowly, making no effort to hide her disgust. “Let’s hope Marcie doesn’t have the same attitude about the food in our fridge.”

I wince but shake it off. “Wait . . . why were you running? And yelling? And—”

“There’s a new boy,” Win interrupts. “A cute one. A tall, well-dressed, glasses-wearing boy . . .” She waits for my reaction eagerly while I await a valid reason for her behavior.

“Okay? And?”

Win grins like the devil herself. “He was reading a book . . . like a real book. A hardcover with a broken-in spine. Something old.”

I gasp and slam my locker shut. “Where is he?”

“By now?” Win looks around the hallway which is only growing more crowded as the clock ticks closer to first period. “He could be anywhere.”

I chew my lip, my grin growing lopsided. “Let’s go find him.”

ONE

PRESENT DAY

MY MOTHER WAS RELIGIOUS IN THE SAME WAY THAT leggings are pants. By that I mean whenever times were desperate or for comfort. Never one to shy away from a passive-aggressive “Bless her heart” or an exasperated “Lord give me strength,” my mom mostly expressed her beliefs in empty platitudes that I often flat-out dismissed.

But she did teach me to pray. Not before bed every night, as her parents so rigidly instructed her, or at a Sunday mass, or to apologize for a laundry list of transgressions that one didn’t need to feel all that sorry for. Instead, my mother, the no-nonsense woman that she was, taught me to treat my one-way calls to the big man in the sky as more of a crisis hotline and less as a suggestion box. “God’s got enough problems,” she’d said. “Don’t waste his time with things you can handle yourself.” Or, at the very least, have the saints handle.

And so, over the course of many years, I discovered what qualified as worthy of God’s attention. Like the time my mom’s shitty Ford Mondeo broke down on the highway during a snowstorm, an hour from home without a pay phone in sight. Or, when my aunt June’s—who’s not actually my blood-relative but rather my mom’s best friend who we shared an apartment with—boyfriend started throwing shit in the adjoining room. Or when my best friend and daughter of Aunt June, Win, didn’t come home right away after swim practice one time and we’d watched a little too much Dateline that week for comfort. Then, of course, when Mom’s doctors said there was nothing left to be done but to make the most of the time she had left. After that, we started to pray a lot.

Desperate prayer is the only kind I’ve ever known.

After Mom passed, I relied on my own instincts to tell me when it was appropriate to pull on that heavenly pair of tin cans tied together with angel’s-harp string. I’d shut my eyes tight and ask something bigger than myself to intervene. A force of some kind. Some deity. Some all-powerful, all-knowledgeable, all-capable thing. Something my mother called God. Something I haven’t been bold enough to name for myself just yet.

And even though I’ve never seen an answered prayer, I still find myself giving it a go. Rarely and only when there’s nothing left to be done, just as Mom taught me. Like right now, for example. Because this event, the gala that I’d decided to host in honor of my late, brilliant mother, is about to fail spectacularly. And there’s nothing I can do to fix it.

“Sarah? Are you back here?” Win, my lifelong best friend, turns the corner of the darkened hallway where I’ve hidden myself away. Her black hair is tied into a low bun, curtain bangs framing either side of her face. The squiggly horizontal lines she gets between her brows when her nose bunches up with worry are visible from here. The moment she sees me leaned against the wall, her shoulders slump and she picks up the bottom of her floor length, purple silk gown to hurry over to me at the far end of the corridor.

“You caught me,” I whine pathetically, wishing there was somewhere left inside of myself to hide.

“I did.” She looks me over, head to toe, with increasing anxiety behind her eyes. “Caleb sent me to find you. The auction is almost over.” After growing up in the same home as Win for our entire childhoods, we know each other at a level deeper than most friends would. Closer to sisters, I’d like to think. Twins maybe, given that we’re the same age. And so, because of that, I know that Win’s tone, the slight hesitancy in her voice when she said the word auction, means that I was right to be back here praying for a miracle. We’re still nowhere near to our fundraising goal—no nearer than we were when I snuck away.

In quick succession I clear my throat, shake my head, and look up to the ceiling—all attempts at avoiding the onslaught of tears threatening to spill over. But they still come, slow and burning as they gather along my bottom eyelids. “Fuck . . .” I whisper, dabbing under my eyes with the sides of my thumbs. The last thing I need is mascara running down my cheeks when I eventually make my way back out there.

“It was a beautiful evening,” Win offers gently, her mouth tilting up on one side. She reaches into her handbag, pulls out a tissue, and offers it to me.

I take it, holding it up to my water line to dab tears away. “Beautiful doesn’t exactly fund research though, does it?” I reply, snarkier than I intended before I sniff back more tears. “Sorry,” I whisper. I’m not mad at Win, I’m angry with myself. So fucking angry.

“No . . . I guess not.” I watch as Win hikes up her dress past her knees, and then lowers herself to sit on the floor, letting the silk material pool between her crossed legs.

I ungracefully drop to sit next to her, my knee-length forest green dress is too tight to do anything but keep my legs extended out in front of me. “I don’t want to go out there,” I say through a heavy sigh as my ass hits the ground.

Win nods slowly, looking back toward the door at the end of the hallway. “Do you want me to tell Caleb to handle it? I’m sure he could—”

“No,” I say forcefully. “No, definitely not.” The last thing I want is for my husband to come to my rescue again. I’ve already wasted so much of our money on this event. His money, if I’m being completely honest with myself. I can’t ask him to also step in to give the saddest goodbye address to a crowd mostly consisting of his business associates and their far-more-accomplished-than-his-own spouses. This isn’t Caleb’s failure; he shouldn’t have to own it. It’s all mine.

Isn’t that what you wanted? some malevolent part of my psyche whispers. Something that’s only yours?

“Then I don’t really see any other option here, babe.” Win pats my thigh and lowers her head onto my shoulder. “You still pulled off an incredible event and it was your very first one. I know you wanted to do it all yourself, but maybe that’s too big a task for anyone to take on. It was also a really big fundraising goal. Maybe next time—”

I tense, straightening my posture, which forces Win to sit up, removing her head from my shoulder. The last thing I want right now is the gentlest possible version of I told you so from the person who’s consistently cheered me on since we were in diapers.

“How much have we raised?” I ask abruptly. “When you left to find me, what was the total?”

Win clears her throat, looking at the hem of my dress, just above my knobby, freckle-covered knees. “Just under one-hundred-and-eighty thousand.”

Shitting-fuckity-fuck.

The goal for tonight is three hundred thousand. Between the hall rental, catering for a crowd of almost four hundred people, entertainment, auction items, décor, and advertising, the event cost just over a hundred and twenty thousand.

I automatically do the math. “Sixty grand,” I murmur, barely audible.

“That’s a lot of money, Sar.” I don’t even think Win heard me; she can just see my obvious disappointment.

I struggle to stand in my tight dress by clawing for a grip at the wall. I begin pacing back and forth as Win’s eyes track me like I’m the ball at Wimbledon.

“Caleb and I could have saved everyone a Saturday night and donated double that amount without all of this . . .” Fanfare. Effort. Time and energy. Ego. Performance. “Bullshit,” is what I land on.

“But you raised awareness, too. Doctor Torres’s speech moved people to tears, Sar. This doesn’t just end tonight. The impact—”

“Dammit,” I whimper, grinding my high heel into the ground as I move my hands to my hips and grip tightly. “Am I some fucking cliché? Some bored, rich housewife who has to have a cause?” I throw my hands up, then wrap them around my shoulders as I gently sway side to side. “What the fuck am I doing, Win?” I ask in soft desperation, clinging on to her eye contact like a lifeline. “I could have stayed at home and toasted to Mom with a glass of her favorite Pinot Grigio and made more of an impact by writing a check for what this stupid event cost. What a waste of fucking time. What a waste of money. What a waste.”

“Sarah, you’re not being fair to yourself. You didn’t know it was going to—” She stops herself, but I hear the last, unspoken word regardless.

“Fail?” I ask, my chest falling on a wounded breath.

Win’s lips tighten, as she holds eye contact, firm yet pleading. As if to say, Don’t make me say it.

“Fail,” I repeat, raising my palms to press against my neck, cradling my jaw in both hands.

“Marcie would be so proud of you,” Win says gently. “I don’t want you doubting that for a second.”

I shake my head stubbornly as I turn away from her. Mom may have been a mother figure to Win from the moment she and Aunt June brought Win home from the hospital, but she was my mom. I’m the one with her DNA flooding my veins. Her auburn hair, her tea-stain eyes, her slightly crooked left incisor, her long legs and disproportionately short torso, her ugly feet with bent-in toes she’d joke were our family’s curse. A stranger’s nose, I once pointed out. A parting gift from my poor excuse for a father, she’d less-than-affectionately replied.

All that to say, I know my mom better than anyone. I am the closest thing to her left living. And I don’t think she’d be proud of me. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long, long while. Because at thirty-one years old, I’ve accomplished next to nothing.

My mom was seventeen when she got pregnant and eighteen when she had me. She scraped every penny together with my also knocked up Aunt June, got a half-decent apartment, and did the best she could with so little.

Marcie Green could throw together a Michelin-star-worthy meal with a couple of cans, whatever else we had in the pantry, and a few bags of frozen vegetables if you gave her an afternoon and a Shania Twain CD to blast on repeat. She’d transform a dilapidated, thrift-store dollhouse into Barbie’s Malibu dream home with a little bit of paint, time, glue, glitter, and effort. She wasted nothing. Not a dollar and certainly not a moment of her life.

While I can proudly claim I have all the physical attributes of my mom, it often feels as if Win inherited the majority of Mom’s personality. After quite literally being dealt the short hand in life—that joke will never get old—Win has overcome so much to be the woman she is today. Her limb difference never once held her back. Hell, I think it somehow even propelled her forward. Stubbornness, maybe. Pride, partially. Tenacity, mostly. All of Mom’s best qualities. Eventually, she found herself in the arms of her dream man and accidental baby daddy, Bo. Ever since those two collided they’ve been unstoppable in making Win’s dreams come true. Dreams they now share.

In just under two months Win and Bo will officially open Camp Cando. A summer camp she has designed for kids with varying disabilities, and their families, to explore nature and have community with one another. And she’ll do it all with my adorable not-quite-two-year-old niece, August, strapped to her back. So, believe me, if Mom’s somewhere looking down on the two of us with pride, it’s sure as shit not me she’s watching.

“Win? Sar?” Bo, Win’s husband, rounds the corner from the opposite end of the hall.

Bo is six foot five, conventionally handsome in a nerd-next-door kind of way, has swoopy blond hair with a middle part, and a beard that could probably use a trim. But I know for a fact that Win likes him to keep it more unkempt. I like to think that Bo was cosmically forced to knock up Win’s stubbornly independent self because the universe knew we needed him and she had sworn off dating.

Since their infamous Halloween romp—at my party—he’s become an irreplaceable member of our family. He reaches all the shit off the high shelves and changes out lightbulbs, for example. But mostly it’s his big heart that we were missing. The affection he gives so easily to all of us but to his daughter and my best friend the most.

I usually refuse to call him by the same name more than once per time spent together, just to keep things interesting. It started as new-kid hazing but Bo, like he does with most things, took it in stride and now it’s just for fun. Variations of his name include Bo, Robert, Roberto, Rob, Robbie, Rob the Builder, Bo-Nus, Bo-bonic plague, Robo-Nerd, Bo the hoe, Daddy Bo, Father Roberts, and—his personal favorite—Bilbo Baggins.

“This place is a fucking labyrinth,” Bo says, looking over his shoulder toward the dimly lit hallway behind him. “Did you two get lost?” He slows, assessing me with just as much care as his wife had only a few minutes ago.

With an audible sigh he steps around me, offering a hand to his wife who holds out her arms in the air expectantly. He pulls her up, and then they both turn toward me, matching worry across their features. I swear they’re starting to meld into one mutant, overly astute, annoyingly cute being.

“You doing okay?” he asks, wincing playfully in a way that tells me he already knows the answer.

I sniff, feeling my sadness metamorphize into bitter resolve. “You’re in finance, Robert . . . so, tell it to me straight. The event cost one hundred and twenty thousand and we’ve made . . .?”

He swallows heavily, making his throat bob. “About one-ninety when I came to find you both.”

“Right.” I nod, my eyes falling closed. “So . . . Good investment?” I ask.

I look up at Win’s gentle giant as he nervously paws at the edge of his beard. “You made a profit,” he says, avoiding eye contact.

“Hmm,” I mumble indifferently.

“And the night isn’t over yet,” he adds, lowering his hand to his trousers’ pocket.

“You’re both too nice.” I check my watch to find that we have about ten minutes before my scheduled farewell address. It was my mom’s watch, actually. Chain-link, gold-plated. It probably cost her less than thirty dollars at a big-box store. I don’t usually wear it, but I thought it might have been a good luck charm tonight. I fiddle with it, fighting the urge to take it off. “I should probably get out there,” I say, brushing my finger across the clock face.

“Caleb told me he can handle it if you want him to. He—”

“No,” Win says, interrupting Bo with a gentle pat to his chest. “She wants to do this herself.”

Bo turns to face me and nods once, wearing a sweet smile. His hand finds his wife’s arm, still draped across his chest, and squeezes her wrist.

Without a single word being spoken, the three of us nod, share a wistful sigh, and then begin walking down the hall. We pass by the storage rooms containing extra tables and chairs, the bustling kitchen as the caterers tidy up for the night, and the side corridor where staff are running back trays of emptied champagne flutes and water glasses, until we reach a set of double doors.

The venue on the other side of the doorway is a classic ballroom containing glistening crystal chandeliers, white draped linens, thin carpeting with intricate swirls of a similar gray color. At the far end there’s a stage, brought in specially for tonight. On top of it sits a clear plastic podium, a large sky-blue backdrop featuring the clinic’s emblem, and, off to the side, a photograph of my mother set upon a white easel.

The photo, from my and Caleb’s wedding, is the only one from Mom’s last year of life that I can stand to look at. She doesn’t look sick at first glance. In it, Mom’s wheelchair is parked next to the first row of pews with Aunt June and Win out of focus behind her in the frame. She’s smiling subtly toward the front of the tiny sanctuary, wearing a feathered, wide-brimmed blue hat. Pride shines across all her features as she watches her blissfully naïve nineteen-year-old daughter promise forever to a man who would have been better described as a boy.

“Ready?” Bo asks, hand on the door in front of us, ready to push.

I force a smile, and feel it does not reach my eyes.

“You’ve got this,” Win says, rubbing my shoulder as Bo opens and holds the door ajar for us to pass through.

Immediately, my ears perk up in confusion. The room we enter is not at all what I was expecting. The vibe is . . . joyous. It’s celebratory. The guests are applauding . . . Smiling . . . Cheering.

Win squeals at my side just as Bo turns on his heels, his face lit with excitement as he stares down at me. I look past them toward the stage where my husband stands tall, presenting an obnoxiously large check written out to the ALS Research Institute of Southern Ontario for three-hundred-thousand dollars to Dr. Torres.

Something in my gut twists as they turn to pose for a photo, laughing like old friends, and the photographer’s flash flares.

This is not an answered prayer.

This is Caleb’s doing.

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

“DON’T MOVE; JUST ONE MORE PIN . . .” MY MOTHER IS on her knees in front of me, her back to the large standing mirror in her bedroom. She’s got her pincushion tied around her wrist like a bracelet as she tugs at the hem of the dress she’s making me for the school dance. I watch in the mirror as she folds over one last piece of the green, silky underlay with a steady concentration.

“Marcie, have you seen my—” Aunt June appears in the doorway, and I spin around to face her, unable to contain my prideful smirk. “Holy shit, Sarah Abilene! Look at you!”

“I said don’t move,” Mom cries out, laughing anxiously. “You’re lucky I didn’t poke you!”

Aunt June nods, a grin lifting her rose-tinted cheeks. “You look hot as hell, girlie.”

“I know, right?” I giggle, twirling the fabric around my knees. “Mom thinks it’s too short.”

Aunt June smiles knowingly toward my mother. “Your mom forgets that you’re fifteen now.”

“If you keep moving around like that your dress will end up crooked,” my mom mutters, but I can hear the humor in her tone as she slips in a final pin and pats my bum, so I make room for her to stand.

“That Caleb kid better keep a tight grip on you at the dance or he’ll lose you to another boy,” Aunt June says, wandering further into my mother’s bedroom. She begins rifling through Mom’s drawers without any sort of permission. “Once Win sees that she’s going to ask you to make her a dress as well, Mars.”

I turn to face the mirror again, catching the tail end of my mother rolling her eyes. “Win has a swim meet the night of the dance, remember? You’re picking her up early from school Friday and driving her to Toronto Prep for—”

Aunt June slams a drawer shut. “Course. I remember.” She slips a set of bangles onto her wrist and moves to stand behind me to admire her reflection, fussing with her bleached-blond hair tied up into a high pony. She’s a petite woman, shorter than me, and voluptuous. She’s not the least bit shy about showing off her curves. “I’ll be back late tonight, don’t wait up!”

“Ooh-la-la,” I sing out as Aunt June spins on her six-inch heels and sways out of the bedroom.

“Do not encourage her,” Mom says, shaking her head. “And, speaking of dates, when am I going to meet this Caleb of yours?” She holds gentle eye contact in the mirror, with one slightly quirked brow. “You’re not embarrassed of your old mom, are you?”

I roll my eyes as she wraps her arms around my shoulders, leaning over me. “Of course not . . . and you’re not old.” I giggle, pressing the side of my forehead into her chin as I stare at our reflection.

“So?” she asks, smiling.

“Soon . . . I promise.”

Soon arrives three days later when Caleb comes to pick me up for the dance. He knocks twice before I open the apartment door. His fist is still raised for what would have been a third rap, but I intercepted it—not bothering to hide that I’d been anxiously awaiting his arrival. “Don’t break up with me until after the dance, okay?”

“Uh, hi?” Caleb says, before his stunned gaze dips down. “Whoa, you look—”

“I know it’s not a nice building.”

“What? No, Sar, it’s—”

“It smells like cigarettes and the paint is chipping off the walls but that’s just in the hallways! It’s nicer in here,” I interrupt, speaking so fast I think I might strain my tongue. “Not as nice as your parents’ house obviously and—”

“Sarah—”

“And my mother is going to ask you a lot of questions. She’ll probably insinuate that she knows a guy who can make people disappear but—” Caleb circles his arm around my waist, tugs me to him, and kisses my lips before they’ve had the chance to stop moving. I relax into his hold.

“My turn now.” He places his hand on my neck, which always makes my knees weaken, then kisses me softly again. “You look amazing,” he says, leaning back to admire my dress once more before a final, light kiss. “I don’t think I’ve seen you nervous before, Green . . . I think I like it.”

I glare at him playfully. “It’s just . . . I know it’s not . . . It’s different than what you’re used to.”

He smiles mischievously and it lights up his entire face. “You may have mentioned that once or twice.”

It’s then that I notice he’s matched his tie to the color of my dress, as I’d requested, and that he’s clearly tried to style his hair in the way I told him I liked best—pushed to one side with one dangling, perfect curl resting against his forehead. “You look very handsome. Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me, weirdo.” His nose scrunches up over the top of a grin as he leans down to kiss me again. Just before his lips meet mine, we’re interrupted by the sound of a purposefully cleared throat.

“Is this the famous Caleb, at last?” my mother says, leaning her hip against the kitchen island. “How about you leave my daughter’s lips alone for a moment and come say hello?”

Caleb rallies quickly, to my surprise. “Hi, Miss Green,” he says, confidently waltzing toward my mother, his hand extended at the ready. “It’s great to meet you.”

Mom’s teasing smile grows lopsided as she tentatively puts out her hand to shake his, her eyes softening enough for me to notice from across the room. “Well, hello . . . How polite.”

TWO

“THERE SHE IS,” CALEB SAYS EXCITEDLY AS HE STEPS up to the podium, pointing me out to the crowd with his hand extended before initiating another round of applause. I smile politely toward the stage, my head bowed as I weave my way through tables of wealthy acquaintances and well-to-do philanthropists—all the while trying to conceive any other possible explanation for this sudden financial uptick and failing.

Caleb looks handsome standing up there in his black suit jacket . . . but I do wish he’d have paired it with something other than his favorite dark denim jeans. Though, in his defense, a lot of the men here tonight are wearing a similar ensemble. The tech-guy wardrobe, as Win affectionately calls it. Her husband is in a custom-fit suit, however.

Caleb’s curly, maple-brown hair is trimmed short and pushed to one side, as it has been since I told him I liked it that way forever ago. He’s not switched up his style of glasses either, wearing the same thinly framed, rounded gray metal over his espresso-colored eyes. The prescription has strengthened with the years, but other than that, nothing about Caleb has changed all that much since we were fourteen.

He’s still exactly six feet tall, though his license says 180 centimeters, which would place him at about five foot eleven. I told him to have it fixed, but he was far too polite to correct the sweet older woman behind the counter at the licensing office. He still has a perfect megawatt smile from braces provided by his parents’ superior dental coverage. The same purplish arrowhead birthmark on his collarbone that I love to press my lips to. The same scar on his right hand from a run-in with a Bunsen burner in the eleventh grade that he teasingly blames me for, and that same casual ease about him that at best can calm you down and at worst make you feel jaded. And while my body has filled out after the second puberty of my mid-twenties, Caleb has kept his lean, rectangular frame. He is my steadfast, easy, contented man. Something solid in a world that constantly seems to shift on its axis.

Caleb has always been safe.

As my whole world began falling apart, when losing my mother became inevitable, there was this kind, if a tad dorky, high school sweetheart who promised to never leave me. Who loved me. The girl from a single-parent home who developed an affinity for drinking a little too much and sneaking the occasional cigarette out of her aunt’s packs. The girl with a shocking amount of overdue library books, an unquenchable desire to be liked, and the vocabulary of a sailor who came with a variety of baggage no teenager ought to have.

I’ve known Caleb for over seventeen years now and loved him for nearly as many. Which is why I know in my gut that this wasn’t some surprise last-minute donation, or high stakes bidding on the final auction item that brought my fundraising goal to completion. This check has Caleb written all over it, even if it doesn’t literally say his name.

It’s the cursed roles we’ve been stuck in since the eleventh grade. The gallant knight riding in on his white horse is here to save me once again. And shit, if being the damsel in distress isn’t getting old.

I eventually find my way to the bottom of the stage and a polite stranger from the closest table extends his arm to help me up the stairs while my husband remains unmoving, wearing his classic, carefree grin. Dr. Torres stands to the left of center stage holding the check loosely in front of his lower half, his eyes held on me with warmth and appreciation.

Just as I finish greeting the doctor, Caleb embraces me once again with a subdued smile, pulling me tight against him.

“How?” I whisper into his ear.

“Later,” he answers, using a hand on my lower back to help me toward the podium center stage.

I clear my throat, looking over the round tables filled by guests evenly spaced around the ballroom. I shake myself and perform a smile, however bewildered it may appear. “Whoa,” I say softly into the microphone, which is followed by a faint high-pitched ringing from the speakers. I swallow thickly, adjusting the microphone stand to my height. “I was only gone ten minutes. . . .” I laugh timidly. The guests laugh too, a polite rumble throughout the room, and I feel better for it.

Though I refused her help in all other preparations for tonight, Win did assist me in writing my speech. Mostly, I had planned to talk about my mother. I was going to say how I’d do anything to have had more years with her. How this research, helped with tonight’s funds, will buy more time for families just like mine. And isn’t that all we ever want? More memories with the people we love?

But now, it feels wrong. I don’t deserve the speech that I suspect was bought for me. I didn’t earn it.

My tongue feels swollen, and my palms begin to sweat as I white-knuckle grip either side of the podium. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, the podium is a bathroom sink at a high school party and I’m looking at myself in the medicine cabinet’s mirror above it. I can see her reflection—seventeen-year-old me. Her lip-gloss is smudged, her hair is askew, and her face is pale. Shame washes over me like a familiar thick fog at the memory. Have I really changed? Have I truly grown from that scared, messy girl?

It took only one hit to my pride for me to give up. To throw away all of my potential. How pathetic is that . . .

Caleb clears his throat behind me, and the room comes back into focus. I force a deep breath, straightening my shoulders.

“Thank you all for coming this evening to help support Doctor Torres and his team at the ALS research institute of Southern Ontario,” I start, my voice steadier than I’d expected it to be. “My mother, Marcie Green, died from complications of ALS eleven years ago. Since then, Dr. Torres’s team has made massive strides in . . .” I trail off momentarily as I look toward the photo of my mother on stage. “In their research. The money we raised tonight, and the donations I hope we all continue to make in the future, will only help their efforts.” Mom’s smile. Her proud, happy smile. “God, I miss her. . . .” I whisper before laughing somberly. “And . . .” I duck my head as I swallow back another wave of heartache. I struggle to catch my breath, as if I haven’t had over a decade’s worth of practice.

When I lift my chin, I can see the general unease across the faces of the attendees. Tilted heads, tilted smiles, tilted champagne flutes. Some well-meaning guest initiates applause and the crowd claps halfheartedly, nodding in sweet, if a bit condescending, encouragement.

I interrupt it. “Truthfully—I could stand up here and say so many things but the heart of it is this . . . I wish that my mom had more time. . . .” I instinctively bring a hand to my chin as I feel it begin to tremble.

Caleb crowds me from behind, his hand slipping onto my hip, his thumb swiping up and down on my lower back. “D’you want me to?” He whispers into my hair.

I turn over my shoulder to shake my head and allow myself a brief moment to study his face. He’s so familiar to me now that I feel myself having to concentrate to truly see him. As if he was a mural passed every morning on the way out the door or the lyrics to a favorite song I’ve sung along to a million times. Beautiful. Special, even. But known.

What would have happened if my mom had more time? I wonder, noticing the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes that, I suppose, haven’t always been there. Would we have gotten married so young? Did I jump from one safety net to the next?

My heart desperately misses the answers that I thought I had at nineteen. The confidence to promise forever to a safe-house boy with a kind heart and the naïveté to believe that would be enough.

As Caleb retreats backward, I take yet another deep breath, fastening on the mask I’ve gotten used to wearing as a well-seasoned hostess. The false face you’re granted when you begin taking advisory meetings at the bank and learn to throw around questions like Where are you summering? It’s clean and polished and shiny, has no discernible emotion, and does not leave a lasting impression—at least with the way I wear it. The moment I feel the mask slip into place, I find the missing parts of my speech within the backlogs of my memory.

“Your generosity tonight will help fund research that can give people living with ALS just that; more time to live. More time to discover who they are. To dance in darkened clubs and fall in love with strangers. To make mistakes and find forgiveness. To drive with music blasting and windows down on a long dirt road. To lie under a tree from dawn to dusk with a good book. To work jobs they hate until they find what they’re meant to do. To spend more hours with their loved ones, doing nothing whatsoever at all, and yet everything, at once. The chance for them to feel as if they got to live a full, consequential life.”

Win nods enthusiastically from the back corner, wrapping her arm around her husband’s waist as he bends down to wipe a tear from her cheek.

“If my mother taught me anything, it was to waste nothing. Not time, opportunities, or resources. So, I encourage you all to continue asking yourselves after tonight: What would Marcie Green do? Because the answer is, probably, drink a glass of white wine, give when you’re able, help when you can, and not waste a moment.”

Caleb steps closer and I turn to find him holding two champagne flutes. I can’t help but smile up at him, taking one. “May I?” he mouths, and I nod in response. “To Marcie,” Caleb says, bending toward the microphone as he toasts the crowd.

“To Marcie,” the room responds in unison, followed by a collective sip.

I let the sparkling bubbles fade off my tongue before I speak again. “Thank you again to Doctor Torres and the team at the research institute and to all of you for being with us tonight. Please get home safely.”

Once I finish, and a gentle applause fades out, the speakers begin playing soft jazz as they had the rest of the evening. I look over the crowd as most guests return to their previous conversations while a few stand to collect their belongings for a quick exit.

“You were amazing, baby,” Caleb says, in a cavalier tone that instantly reminds me of who paid my speech’s acceptance fee.

I spin on him, fast enough that my hair swings over my shoulder. “What did you do?” I enunciate each word in a menacing, slow whisper.

Caleb instantly recoils, his brows twisting together. “What? I—”

“Your mother would be so proud.” Dr. Torres’s voice booms as he makes his way across the stage, his hand reaching out to grasp my arm, which he squeezes tightly. “Nice save,” he says, winking at Caleb. “You’ve got a good man here.” He switches hands to hold the check as he drops my arm and clasps Caleb’s shoulder instead.

Caleb turns his attention toward me, his lips pulled into an uncomfortable smile.

“I do,” I reply, as genuinely as I’m able, though I feel my eyes glaze over with the sheer amount of effort it takes.

“Have a good night, you two,” Dr. Torres says. “You deserve it!” he adds, sauntering off the stage, the obscenely large check in hand.

“Are you seriously mad?” Caleb asks in a near whisper, his eyes scanning over my head to the tables and guests below.

“Well, that depends. . . .” I glare at the underside of his jaw until he tilts his chin back down to face me.

“On?” One of his brows ticks upward in challenge. I accept.

“On how we managed to raise an extra hundred thousand dollars within the ten minutes it took for Bo to find me.”

His thumb scratches the side of his nose, then just slightly above his lip as he looks down, a crooked smirk pulling at his lips. “Would you believe me if I said it was a very last-minute, anonymous donor?”

“No,” I answer with a short sigh. “I would not.” He reaches for my free hand, but I step back, placing it on my hip instead. Then, I bring my champagne flute to my lips as I stare at him unflinchingly over the top of the glass, swallowing every last drop. His fingers toy with the golden wedding band on his left hand, twisting it around his ring finger as he waits for me to finish. Once I do, I wipe my thumb across my bottom lip, and tilt my head expectantly, purposefully keeping a blank expression.

Caleb bends toward me, speaking in a hushed tone. “You worked so hard for tonight, Sar . . . What was I supposed to do?”

I scoff. He just doesn’t get it. “Nothing, Caleb. You were supposed to do nothing,” I say, a little too loudly. I only register that because Caleb’s eyes move sharply to the crowd beyond the stage with a hint of panic.

His jaw flexes, the tendon in the side of his neck visible as he begins to speak in a low, ragged tone. “I don’t even really know why we’re arguing at all right now but . . .” He pauses, crossing his arms. “Can we discuss this later? Without an audience?”

I don’t answer. Instead, I turn on my heels and storm off the stage; knowing that he’ll follow. I make my way across the ballroom toward the kitchens and the familiar darkened hallway where I’d gathered my courage earlier, nearing the double doors where Bo and Win are still standing.

“We’re gonna get going. Our babysitter can’t stay late and . . .” Win doesn’t finish her thought, gently shoving her purse into Bo’s arms as she bends to take off her heels. I pass them without a second glance, too angry to stop. I hear Bo whistle long and low, signaling that I must look as pissed off as I feel.

When the familiar footfalls behind me stop abruptly, I look back to see Caleb saying a thoughtful goodbye to them both. Rage boils up closer to the surface at the sight of him taking the time to chat with our friends when he should be following me.

Now, on top of everything else, Caleb wins the better friend award too.

Pushing past the double doors, I move into a storage room lined with spare tables and place my emptied champagne flute onto a storage shelf. I forcefully remove my heels and drop them onto an emptied dolly before I begin pacing in frantic circles, rubbing at my chin so forcefully that I’m sure a layer of makeup has come off onto my palm.

“Sarah?” Caleb calls out apprehensively from the hallway. I hear the double doors shut behind him, the sounds of the crowd and music muffling as they do. “Are you back here?”

“In here,” I respond, crossing my arms. In doing so the clasp of my watch—my mother’s watch—gets stuck on the tulle overlay of my dress. Groaning, I begin tugging at it.

“Where?” Caleb replies, sounding no closer.

“The storage room!” I snap, struggling to pull the watch free. Growing hot behind the eyes, I wrench my wrist a little too hard. Helplessly, I watch as the watch’s clasp breaks before it falls onto the linoleum floor. When I bend down to pick it up, I notice that the tulle of my dress now has a small tear in it as well. “Of course,” I mutter to myself, slipping the broken watch into my cleavage for safekeeping.

This dress doesn’t have pockets. The dresses my mom made me always had pockets.

“Sarah?” Caleb calls out again, apparently attempting to start up a friendly game of Marco Polo.

“Oh my god!” I yell, stepping out into the hall with my arms extended above my head as if to wave down a plane. “There’s one open fucking door in this hallway with a woman inside of it losing her mind ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ style. Did you even attempt to move from that exact spot? Get in here!”

Caleb’s nostrils flare as his chest inflates with a deep breath. “Sarah, I know tonight is emotional for you but—” He begins walking toward me as my sharp laugh cuts him off.

“Right, of course, emotional. I’m emotional! I couldn’t possibly be justified in being angry with you.”

“Maybe if you could explain why you’re angry with me?” Caleb asks, moving closer until I’m backed into the room. He shuts the door behind him after a quick, nervous glance into the hallway.

“This was my fundraiser, Caleb. Mine. Not yours. Not anyone else’s. I did all of this by myself, and I intended to fail or succeed by myself.”

“By yourself, huh?” he asks, voice verging on mocking.

“Yes,” I spit back.

Caleb huffs exasperatedly, glancing up to the ceiling as he undoes the top button on his white dress shirt, exposing his Adam’s apple and a whisper of chest hair. “All right, sure . . .” he says, sarcasm rolling off his tongue. “The guest list, then. How exactly did that come about?”

I grind my molars together, dead-eyeing him.

He nods as if he can hear my snarky thoughts under my vacant expression, his lips pouting in a shitty type of smug expression that I’d like to rub off his face with a dig of my own. “Because I distinctly remember sitting at our kitchen counter as we pulled that list together from my contacts.”

“Yeah, thanks for those. Turned out great. Ree-aally generous friends you’ve got there. And so nice of your parents to show!” They’d not even bothered to RSVP, never mind attend, but Caleb saved them seats at our table regardless.

That knocks the smug look off his face. No one in the history of ever has held two such lousy people in such high regard as Caleb does his parents. “I told you to start smaller, Sar.” He did. I hate that he did. Win did too, in less direct wording. “I told you to—”

“You understand that you’ve made this night meaningless, right?” I ask, tears threatening to pour. I force them away, choking them down until the sadness rests heavy in my throat. I know the moment Caleb sees me cry, he’ll stop fighting. To him, tears are a white flag in battle—an immediate call for ceasefire. Perhaps it’s reckless of me but tonight I’d rather us both be wounded than experience another silent car ride home with unspoken frustrations continuing to pile between us.

I’m done pretending that everything is fine. I’m done pretending that I am fine. Honestly, I think part of me wants Caleb to be mad at me. I can’t always be harder on myself than everyone else is, surely.

“Before you stepped in, I could have at least said I turned a profit. Now between the cost of the event and our own donation, we haven’t.”

“That’s crap and you know it. It was a loss either way,” he says, one of his shoulders lifting as he points toward the ballroom. “You told me weeks ago that you wanted to raise at least double what it cost us. That’s what you said. You were nowhere close to that.”

Out of all the moments to be on the exact same page, I wish it wasn’t this one. “I’m really loving the times you’re choosing to use us and then you,” I say, trying to force my voice even.

“Pardon?” Caleb crosses his arms and hunches forward.

“You said what it cost us and that I was nowhere near close.”

“Well, you made yourself clear. It’s your event, not mine.”

“But it’s our money I spent, not mine?” I retort.

Caleb purses his lips. “What’s mine is yours,” he replies pointedly.

Allowing that shitty turn of phrase to breathe for a moment, I stare at the tactfully closed door. It reminds me of Caleb’s urgency to get off the stage when I spun on him. And, sure, I care what the people out there think of me too, so it shouldn’t bother me that Caleb does the same and acts accordingly. But it brings up an old wound that time never seems to fully heal.

No matter how many times he’ll tell me otherwise, I feel like I embarrass him. That I’m the unerasable red-wine stain on the otherwise perfectly clean tablecloth that is the Linwood family.

His mother’s indifference toward me over the years, in stark contrast to her unbridled pride in her son, is only ever expressed in fleeting, passive-aggressive comments that hint at my lack of career or ambition. Questions like: How have you been keeping busy? Or comments such as: You must be lonely in that big house all day. And these are immediately followed by news of Caleb’s sister, Cora’s, career achievements or phone-tree gossip about their friends’ daughters—who would have been much better wives, no doubt—and their bright, shining, somehow-still-single lives. As if to remind Caleb that other women still exist in the world. Successful women. Women ready to give him children if he so desires because of course it’s solely my decision for us to not have kids.

Caleb’s dad, Cyrus, is universally indifferent to anything that doesn’t fill his pockets. He met Caleb’s mother, Michelle, during her first year of college when he, thirteen years her senior, taught a guest lecture on networking in business. I wasn’t there but I’d wager to guess that the keynotes were: Be born rich and use daddy’s contacts to get ahead. After that first encounter, Michelle quickly became “Chellie” to him and, soon after, everyone else. The Linwoods have a long, eerie tradition of all family members having first names that begin with the letter C. He didn’t call her Chellie out of affection or familiarity—he did it so she’d fit the mold.

Sometimes I wonder if Cyrus would like me more if my name was Claire or Charlotte or Cecelia. No . . . not that last one.

“I’m sorry tonight failed,” I say, turning to face him—my eyes wide and smile insincere. “I’ll be sure to pay you back.”

Caleb’s shoulders sink as he drags a hand down from forehead to chin. “Fuck’s sake, Sarah. You know I don’t think about it like that. That’s not fucking fair!” His voice rises, startling us both—Caleb rarely yells. Never at me. The moment freezes, as do I.

“Fuck . . . Sorry.” He blows out a long breath, bringing his wrists to his temples. “I—I didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t think that it would upset you.” His shoulders fall on another sigh. “I really was just trying to help.”

“Yeah,” I say, then mumble, “always so helpful.”

“Do you expect me to apologize for that?” he asks, letting his arms fall heavy to his sides. “You were off pouting somewhere, the auction was done, I sent Bo and Win to try and find you, but time was running out and I had to make a decision. I’m sorry that I thought you’d rather save face, but clearly, I underestimated your pridefulness.”

“Well, times are tough!” I laugh bitterly. “I have to reserve the resources when my supply of pride runs so goddamn low.”

Caleb rolls his eyes. “Don’t be dramatic. You have plenty to be proud of.”

“Really?” I smile near hysterically, shaking my head as the tip of my nose burns with the threat of tears once again. “What, exactly? Name one thing that I should be proud of, Cay. Something that’s only mine. Something that I’ve done entirely on my own.”

I watch as the man who’s known me for seventeen years, the very same man who’s been hailed as a genius and received endless awards for his innovative, brilliant brain, struggles to come up with a single answer.

And there’s no fighting it anymore, his silence cracks me wide open. Tears spring loose on a broken sob.

Caleb’s eyes close softly as he lessens the distance between us and wraps me in his arms.

That’s enough, I think.

White flag.

Take me home.