Page 84 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

"I don't think what either of us felt back then was anything close to what this is," I said, working through it out loud. "You were eighteen, furious and grieving your family falling apart. I was a fourteen-year-old with a harmless crush on the tragic boy sweeping the storeroom. That's not where anything between us started. But it's where you started becoming someone I could eventually fall in love with. That year, sweeping up glass and learning what building instead of destroying actually means."

"That's exactly it." Ethan squeezed my hand. "I didn't fall for you back then, and I need you to know I'm not saying that. But I never forgot what your grandfather did for me. And when I found myself standing in that same bakery twenty years later, about to help destroy it a second time, I couldn't do it. Not just because I recognized you. Because I recognized the debt I still owed him, and I wasn't going to repay his kindness with betrayal a second time."

"And somewhere in there, actually getting to know me as an adult—"

"I fell completely, terrifyingly in love with her. Yes." He brought my hand to his lips. "Manuel gave me a second chance most people wouldn't have. You gave me the space to prove I deserved it instead of just assuming I would. I spent twenty years trying to become someone worthy of both those gifts. I don't think I actually managed it until six weeks ago, when I had to choose between protecting his granddaughter and protecting my career."

"He would have been so proud of you," I whispered. "Not just for choosing me. For becoming someone who chooses to build instead of destroy, every single time, even when it costs everything."

"I hope so." His voice broke slightly. "I've spent so long wanting to be someone he wouldn't be ashamed of."

"He isn't. He wouldn't be." I leaned my forehead against his. "You spent a year learning that from him. Then you spent your whole career forgetting it. And now you're finally living it, right when it matters most. I think that's exactly the kind of story he would have wanted told."

We sat there for a while, the weight of twenty years settling into something that finally made sense—not a secret hidden between us, but a shared history we'd both been quietly carrying, waiting for the right moment to set it down together.

"I love you," I said finally. "Not because of some story I'd been sitting on for six weeks. Because of who you are right now. The man who stood in that community center and told two hundred people the truth. The man who's spent this entire time proving, over and over, that he learned my grandfather's lesson better than either of us gave him credit for."

"I love you too." He kissed me, soft and certain. All the tension and fear of the last six weeks finally settling into something steady. Something real.

When we broke apart, he rested his forehead against mine.

“Come on!” I kissed him again, unable to help myself. "Let's go home. You've had a very long day of publicly destroying your reputation and finally saying the thing we've both been dancing around for six weeks. I think you've earned some rest."

"Home," he repeated, standing and pulling me up with him. "I really like that word."

We walked back to the car together, hand in hand, the weight of the day settling into something almost peaceful. Tomorrow would bring more legal chaos—criminal arraignments, ethics preparation, Marcus’s inevitable furious response to tonight's public confession.

But tonight, I had this: a man who'd once stood in the wreckage of my grandfather's life's work at his very lowest moment, and had spent twenty years trying to become someone worthy of the grace he'd been given—grace I'd watched him earn all over again, this time in front of me. A future that felt, for the first time in weeks, genuinely possible instead of just desperately hoped for.

"Hey, Ethan?"

"Yeah?"

"Vovô would have really liked watching this happen. The two of us, I mean. Watching the boy he gave a second chance to grow into someone who'd fight this hard for what he built."

Ethan smiled, the exhaustion in his face softening into something warmer. "Building instead of destroying. I think I finally understand what he meant. It's not one choice you make once. It's every choice, over and over, for the rest of your life."

"That sounds like something he'd say."

"I had a good teacher. Even if it took me twenty years to actually learn the lesson. And a patient witness, who let me prove it instead of just taking my word for it."

I laughed, leaning into him as we walked toward the car. Maybe Vovô hadn't orchestrated this exact outcome, sweeping up broken glass with a furious eighteen-year-old on a summer night decades ago. But he'd planted something that night—a belief that people could rebuild what they'd broken, a standard for the kind of person worth becoming.

And somehow, impossibly, it had grown into this: Ethan, standing beside me, choosing integrity over comfort, choosing me over everything he used to think mattered.

That felt like exactly the kind of legacy my grandfather would have wanted.

Chapter twenty-seven

Ironclad

Maya

Sweetheart Week's final Saturday arrived with the kind of perfect Pacific Northwest weather that made tourists start seriously considering real estate listings—blue skies, gentle breeze, the ocean doing its best impression of a postcard. Honey & Hearth had been slammed since dawn, and by noon I'd sold out of heart-shaped pastéis de nata twice, which meant I'd been making emergency batches in between ringing up customers like some kind of caffeinated baking octopus.

"We're going to break last year's revenue record," Tessa announced, emerging from the front counter with the specific glow she had when she did the accounting and liked the results."Not break it. Demolish it. I'm talking thirty percent above projections."

"Please don't jinx it."