Page 93 of Faking it with my Bad Boy Crush

"Itisslightly unhinged. It's also extremely you, and I find it strangely romantic in a way I probably shouldn't admit out loud." I kissed him again. "November works. Gives my mother more time to terrorize a tent consultant, gives Tessa more time to gather material for a wedding-themed short story, and gives us actual closure before we say vows. I like it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Feels right to actually finish building your legal comeback before we build a marriage on top of it." I squeezed his hand. "Besides, November means Sweetheart Week planning happens after the wedding instead of during it, which honestly might save our sanity."

"Small mercies." He pulled me close. "I love you. And I love that we're the kind of couple who plans weddings around ethics board timelines. I don't think that's something either of us could have predicted a year ago."

"A year ago I was fighting a fraudulent property dispute alone, and you were still pretending corporate law made you happy. We've both come a long way."

Tessa cleared her throat loudly from her stool, still clutching her notebook. "As much as I'm loving this extremely tender moment, I need someone to make a decision about whether we're doing a sit-down dinner or a dessert reception, because your mother has texted me four times in the last hour asking about catering logistics, and I cannot keep deflecting."

"Dessert reception," Ethan and I said simultaneously, then looked at each other and laughed.

"It's a bakery wedding," I clarified. "Obviously the reception is going to be an elaborate dessert spread. I'm not hiring outside catering for my own wedding when I literally own a bakery."

"Finally, a decision. I'll tell your mother." Tessa made a note, then looked up with unexpected softness. "For what it's worth, you two are disgustingly cute, and I'm going to cry through this entire wedding, and I'm blaming both of you specifically for ruining my professional cynicism." She stood, gathering her notebook. "Speaking of professionalism, I need to perfect my website. If I can remember the domain name. It’s been a while. But congratulations, both of you. On the wedding, on the reinstatement, on somehow turning an absolute legal disaster into the most romantic story this island has ever produced."

After she left, Ethan and I stood together behind the counter, the late afternoon light catching the front window—clean, whole, twenty years removed from the night it shattered under the weight of his rage and grief.

"Four months," I said quietly. "Then full reinstatement. Then a wedding. Then whatever comes after that."

"Whatever comes after that," Ethan agreed, wrapping his arms around me from behind, both of us looking out at the water through glass that had been broken and repaired and now stood as permanent as anything in this world could be. "I used to think building meant something enormous. Career, reputation, success. Now I think it just means this. Showing up every day, choosing each other, choosing this island and this bakery and this ridiculous, complicated life we built out of the wreckage of everything I almost destroyed."

"Vovô would call that the whole point," I said. "Everything worth having takes time to build. Bread needs time to rise.Trust needs time to earn. Love needs time to become something permanent instead of just promising."

"He was a very wise man."

"He was. I think you would have loved getting to know him as you are now, instead of just as the man who caught you mid-destruction and decided to believe in you anyway."

"I think about that sometimes. What he'd say, seeing where I ended up." Ethan's voice was soft, reflective. "I hope he'd be proud."

"He would be." I turned in his arms, meeting his eyes with complete certainty. "He'd say you finally learned to bake something that actually rises. Metaphorically speaking, obviously, because your literal baking skills still need work."

"I made croissants last week that Tessa said were 'edible, in a technical sense.'"

"High praise, coming from Tessa." I laughed, kissing him one more time as the afternoon light shifted gold across the bakery floor. "Four months. Then forever. I like our timeline, Ethan Caldwell."

"I like our timeline too, future Mrs. Caldwell. Romano? Romano-Caldwell? Ms., not Mrs.? We should probably discuss that at some point."

"We'll add it to the list. Right after 'figure out if Jennifer Walsh gets cake' and 'convince my mother that a bakery tent is a legitimate wedding venue.'"

"Building an entire life, one absurd logistics decision at a time."

"Exactly like it should be."

Epilogue – Building Forever

Maya

The morning of my wedding, I woke up at 3:45am out of habit, reached for my apron before I remembered I wasn't opening the bakery today, and spent a solid thirty seconds having a minor identity crisis in bed.

I lay there in the dark for a while, staring at my mother's guest room ceiling, listening to Tessa's even breathing from the other bed, and tried to talk my body out of its own muscle memory.No ovens today. No dough to proof. Sleep, Maya.It took twenty minutes of negotiating with my own nervous system before I finally drifted off again, and when I next opened my eyes, softgray morning light was coming through the curtains and my phone said 6:17am.

"You're doing the thing," Tessa said from the other bed, not even opening her eyes, apparently roused by the sound of me sitting up. "The thing where you panic-reach for work clothes because your body doesn't understand the concept of a day off."

"I don't have a thing."

"You have several things. It's a whole personality and I notice these things. That’s why the Times critic called Kaya ‘a minor, yet fully realized character’.” She finally sat up, hair a disaster. Her novel had spent the last three weeks climbing the Sweet Romance charts and she still hadn't quite gotten used to strangers recognizing the title. "How are you feeling? Marrying a formerly disbarred, now newly reinstated attorney who once vandalized your family's bakery—which I still cannot believe you didn’t tell me about immediately—and is currently, as we speak, probably having a nervous breakdown somewhere on this island?"