He looked at the snow globe.
He’d spent years mistaking Lauren’s crafts for weakness.
Now he knew better.
Shewasn’t the weak one.
He was.
Tom stoodin the living room of Lauren's parents' house, staring at the explosion of handmade everything.
Nothing in his parents' house had been made by their hands.
He moved through the room slowly. A basket beside the couch overflowed with half-finished projects. Yarn trailing from knitting needles. Embroidery hoops. A quilted table runner that was only partially sewn.
Evidence of creation everywhere. Evidence of trying.
How do I prove it to her? How do I show it?
Tom rubbed his face and headed upstairs. Lauren's childhood bedroom.
Textbooks from college. Young adult novels with cracked spines. And there, wedged between novels was what looked like a crafting manual?—
Lauren made things. She made cookies and quilts and garlands strung through the house.
Around him, Lauren's childhood room held its breath. Glow-in-the-dark stars overhead. A bulletin board covered with certificates and drawings and photos of Lauren at every age, smiling and bright and so obviously loved.
This was what Lauren had grown up with. Parents who celebrated her exactly as she was. Who hung her mother's amateur paintings like they belonged in a gallery. Who kept every craft project, every attempt, every expression of joy.
The answer had been staring him in the face the entire time.
He looked around the room. At the sponge-painted walls. Creation. Effort. Something made with your own hands that saidyou matter to me.
He would make something. With his own hands. Something that took effort and time and showed her—really showed her—that he saw her now. That he understood what she'd been trying to give him all along.
Something homemade and heartfelt.
Tom looked around her childhood bedroom. At all the evidence of a girl who'd grown up knowing that handmade meant love.
He'd tell their love story in her language this time.
Homemade and heartfelt. The way she'd been trying to teach him all along.
CHAPTER 31
Lauren
The sky was alreadythat deep, bruised blue of winter evenings—barely five o’clock and the world already fading. Lauren only made it halfway to her front door before stopping short.
The curb was empty.
The trash bins sat neatly by the road, lids closed. A few stray pine needles clung to the snow beside them.
But the boxes—her boxes—were gone. No cardboard, no labels, no traces of the life she’d packed up and set out like an offering to be carried away.
Her breath hitched.
Were they gone when she’d left this morning? Last night? Had she even looked?
