Inside was a book.
Hazel froze the second she saw the cover. Her breath hitched.
The title was lettered in soft gold script.The Art of Rising.
Her throat closed.
She turned the cover and found her own handwriting looking back at her— recipes she’d written over the years, tucked into corners of napkins and receipts, now transcribed in careful ink. Each page was laid out like a real cookbook: measurements, ingredients, instructions. But there were photos, too. Crisp, warm-toned ones that Juno had clearly taken. Close-ups of latticed pies, sugar-dusted loaves, her hands rolling dough on the butcher-block counters. On the bottom of each page was a quote from a townsperson— Malcolm, Iris, Sylvia, Elise, Connor, even Mr. Everett— and little notes about what the dish meant to them.
Hazel didn’t speak, she couldn’t.
“I had help,” Beck admitted, quiet now. “Juno and Iris. Malcolm found some of the handwritten ones you’d stuck inside the cupboard. We tried to keep it true to you.”
Hazel pressed her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were burning, the threat of tears imminent and not something she could fight for long.
“This is—“ she began, her voice cracking beneath the weight of the emotion. “This is too much.”
“It’s not,” Beck said, shifting closer. “It’s exactly what you deserve.”
Hazel closed the book and launched herself into his arms. He caught her easily, her face buried into his neck, his hands wrapping around her like he’d done it a hundred times before.
She didn’t sob, not quite, but the tears came anyway.
She wasn’t used to being seen like this. And certainly not held through it.
After the tears had begun to slow, Hazel drew back just enough to see Beck, her palms still pressed against his chest. His eyes were steady, searching hers in that patient way of his, like he’d wait as long as it took for her to speak.
Somewhere along the way, this pull between them had stopped feeling like something she could resist. Maybe it wasneversomething she could resist. The pull toward him had been there from the start, quiet but unyielding, threading itself through every look, every brush of his hand, every unspoken thing left hanging in the space between them.
Like the tide to the shore, inevitable and constant, until she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began.
The words rose up from somewhere deep, older than the moment, older than even her understanding of them— certain, whole, and impossible to swallow back.
“I love you,” she whispered, the syllables breaking open in her mouth like something she’d been holding too long.
His breath caught, just the faintest hitch. His lips curved and he smiled,reallysmiled, in that way she’d only seen from him once or twice.
“I love you too, Hazel,” he whispered back, in that low and steady way he said all the things he’d never take back.
For a moment they just stayed there, forehead to forehead, the weight of those words settling between them like a place to rest.
The house was quiet again.
Like the kind of stillness that came after a storm, soft and heavy with relief.
Hazel stood barefoot in the kitchen, her coffee cradled in both hands, the sweater she had stolen from Beck still wrapped around her shoulders like a second skin. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been watching him.
Out the back window, through the blur of frost-laced glass, she could see him in the yard. His jacket sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, boots crunching in the snow as he moved from the woodpile to the chopping block. He hadn’t said anything, hadn’t asked. He’d just slipped on his pants and coat after breakfast, grabbed her grandmother’s old axe from the shed, and gone out to replenish the dwindling pile of wood around the back of the house.
She watched the rhythm of him— how steady he was, how deliberate. The swing of his arms. The strength in his shoulders. The way he paused between each split, breath rising visibly in the cold air. He moved like someone who understood the importance of small things done well. Of rituals. Of tasks that served no one but the people you cared about.
Hazel didn’t realize she’d sat down until she felt the edge of the kitchen chair beneath her.
Her phone was on the table before her and she stared at it for a long time, a million thoughts rolling through her mind all at once.
Things she wanted to do, things she needed to say, and everything else in between.
Eventually, she reached for it. Her thumbs hovered above the screen again, just like they had a few days ago, but the ache was different now. Sharper in some ways, but cleaner. Less tangled.
