Page 94 of The Pumpkin Pie Book Nook

ROBYN

What do you actually want, Robyn?

Robyn kept repeating Tyler’s question. The chai had gone lukewarm, Mr. Darcy had migrated from the armchair to her feet and back to the armchair again, the manuscript had been open on the same page for twenty minutes, and she could still hear Tyler’s voice asking her the one question she’d been successfully avoiding for months.

She knew what she wanted. Truly.

She wanted to save the bookshop. She wanted Tyler and Emma—this almost-family, this home she hadn’t expected. And she wanted to keep her career, too. She wanted to teach. She wanted to build something meaningful. She wanted to be proud of the life she built.

Robyn exhaled, setting her tea down with careful hands.

One thing at a time.

Tonight, she didn’t have to solve her entire future. She didn’t have to untangle Yale and Maple Falls and her parents and every terrifying unknown.

She just had to do one thing.

She had to finish Isabel’s story.

Robyn reread the final installment again, slower this time. Letting herself sink into Isabel’s voice.

And then Robyn opened a fresh document. Her fingers hovered for a beat.

She imagined Isabel in her mind, trusting her words to paper the way you trusted a secret to someone you loved.

Robyn swallowed. Then she started typing. At first, it was halting. She typed one sentence, then another, then a backspace, then a rewrite.

But slowly, the rhythm returned. Her characters started talking, and they had a lot to say. The romance beat in Robyn’s chest like a second heartbeat. She stopped thinking about the town and the expectations and the judgment and started thinking about the story—what it needed, what it deserved.

What Isabel had been asking for all along.

Hours passed without her noticing. The tea went cold. Her laptop warmed her thighs. Outside the loft window, Maple Falls sank deeper into night.

When she finally typed the last line, her heart fluttered. Robyn sat back, blinking at the screen. She’d done it. She’d finished the story.

Then she saved the file twice, because yeah, that’s happened before.

She climbed into bed sometime before 4 a.m., mind still buzzing, the final line looping through her thoughts like a lullaby she couldn’t stop humming.

Three hours later, she woke with a start, heart racing, as if her body had remembered she was on a deadline. Robyn padded back to the couch, hair a mess, eyes gritty, and reopened the document.

She reread the ending. Once, and then twice, and then sent it off to Tyler for him to work his magic.

She’d played her part; now she needed to make sure the event went beautifully—because perhaps, among the guests, there would be the perfect buyer.

FORTY-TWO

TYLER

Maple Falls had always shown up for Halloween, and tonight, Oak Way felt even more enchanted than usual. Lanterns lined the street in warm, flickering rows. Storefront windows glowed with orange lights and paper silhouettes of cats, bats, and bare-branched trees cut from black card and pressed to the windows. Emily had set up a pop-up outside her shop selling gingerbread skulls, pumpkin cookies, and double chocolate cupcakes. Tyler could tell it was a hit by the length of the line alone.

Out front of the bookstore, the book club had outdone themselves getting the place ready for the Midnight in Maple Falls event. It wasn’t just the decorations, but the feeling that something big was about to happen. The town had been building toward it for weeks without even realizing it.

Two lanterns hung on either side of the bookshop’s door, and a black cauldron sat on a small table beside the steps, dry ice churning inside it so mist spilled out in slow, hazy waves. The smoke curled around boots and hems as people stepped through it, grinning like they’d just crossed into another world.

And they had. Paper bats hung from the ceiling, their wings swaying every time someone brushed past. Warm candlelight flickered in the windows beside strings of soft fairy lights tucked along the shelves. The smell of coffee, pumpkin pie, paper, and ink mixed in the air.

A line had formed at the entrance—an actual line—stretching down the sidewalk, winding past the Cinnamon Spice Inn, and Tyler couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the bookstore this crowded. The air inside was warm and bright and alive, the kind of warmth that came from bodies pressed close and voices overlapping and the shared thrill of being part of something.