Page 9 of This Life of Mine

It’s everything we imagined.

Every risk. Every late night. Every moment we questioned whether we’d ever make it has become real enough to touch.

We did it.

Val—my longtime friend and now business partner—and I started with little more than recipes, determination, and the willingness to outwork everyone around us.

Long before these walls existed, we spent our weekends hauling tents, tables, buffet servers, and boxes of baked goods to farmers’ markets. We’d wake before dawn, load the truck while everyone else was still asleep, and spend hours on our feetserving customers one cinnamon roll, one cookie, one loaf at a time.

Then we’d do it all over again the next weekend.

The weekdays weren’t much easier. They were spent shopping for ingredients, mixing dough, testing new recipes, baking until our feet ached, packaging orders, cleaning equipment, planning menus, and somehow finding the energy to do it all again.

There weren’t days off. There was only the next market. The next customer. The next chance to prove we could build something bigger.

Brick by brick. Batch by batch. Weekend after weekend, we watched strangers become regulars and regulars become our biggest cheerleaders.

Until one day...we weren’t just dreaming about owning a bookstore bakery anymore.

We were unlocking the front door to one.

We have been part of each other’s lives for over ten years, woven together by shared history and countless memories.

She has stood beside me through so much of my life, the joyful seasons and the unbearable ones alike.

She was there during the moments that shattered me most, including the loss of my baby, offering a steady presence when I could barely stand on my own.

Val was also there when my marriage ended, though that moment was less like devastation and more like release.

Leaving a long, turbulent relationship that had drained me of myself wasn’t a loss; it was liberation. And stepping into that freedom, with Val beside me, remains one of the greatest turning points of my life.

Being trauma-bonded to someone through your teenage years and into young adulthood is a prison that’s difficult to recognize, let alone escape.

I met my husband when I was sixteen through a mutual friend. He was three years older than me. He was my first real relationship, my first everything.

For years, I wore that fact like a badge of honor. I believed there was something noble in having given myself wholly to one person. My heart, my body, my future. I rationalized it meant commitment, loyalty, strength.

What I failed to grasp at that time was the extent to which that pride was being used to my detriment.

I was made to believe that my destiny was small and pre-written, that I was meant to be a wife before I was allowed to be a woman, obedient before I could be whole.

Cole, my now ex-husband, believes the world operates to his advantage—raised to expect it, really.

His family came from old money—oil money, land that stretched farther than you could see, leases that paid out with no one lifting a finger. Generations of men who never worried about hard work because life was handed to them on gold platters.

I will admit they knew how to grow their income. Though when money arrives that easily, it tends to multiply itself with little effort. Royalties became investments. Investments became businesses. Businesses became more land. A million dollars wasn’t life-changing to people like the Allisters. It was seed money. Something to invest, leverage, and turn into twenty million more.

Wealth built wealth while they slept.

That kind of wealth teaches you things early. That rules are flexible. That power doesn’t need to be questioned—only enforced.

Cole was brilliant when it came to money. He understood investments, risk, and the power of compound growth better than anyone I’d ever met. He could take a dollar and turn it into ten, always thinking three steps ahead.

But the lessons he taught me about relationships were far more damaging.

Cole taught me what passed for love in his world. Quiet. Conditional. Earned.

I learned that my role was to support, to submit, to shape my life around his expectations. Every sacrifice was proof of my devotion. Every compromise was evidence of my love.