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Page 35 of Falling for Him (Honey Leaf Lodge #3)

Ben

She’d said it so beautifully.

Every word, every soft hope wrapped in laughter and cinnamon-sugar dreams. Fifi hadn’t just told me her vision of the future. She painted it in color. Bright, vibrant, home-spun colors. And for a few suspended seconds, I let myself believe I could be part of that painting.

Until reality snapped back.

And I remembered I was the wrong shape for the frame.

I left her house a little while later—kissed her cheek, touched the side of her face, let her believe I had to return some calls. It wasn’t a lie, not really. But it wasn’t the full truth either.

I needed space.

Not from her.

From myself.

I walked along the downtown, glancing at the lake, and making my way back to the lodge, where the trees grew thicker and the trail to the overlook wasn’t as popular this time of day. The shadows stretched long, and the fading sun lit up the lake in gold, and I tried to breathe.

Tried not to drown in it.

Those images she gave me —kids running barefoot through the lodge, her daughter helping in the kitchen, the rescue farm becoming part of their DNA —it gutted me. Not because it wasn’t beautiful. But because it was.

And I wasn’t sure I deserved it.

Or worse, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be capable of giving it to her.

I ran a hand through my hair and stared out over the trees.

I’d built my life out of hard choices. Stayed in Florida while my brother ran from everything. Took care of our parents as a teenager as they slowly drank themselves into the ground. Made myself useful. Responsible. The son who didn’t flake.

And when it was over?

I graduated from law school.

I got married.

I got promoted.

Made partner.

A shiny plaque, a corner office, and absolutely no one to call when I got there.

My marriage had been brief, brittle, and born of desperation to be normal.

It ended with mutual silence and a thank-you-for-trying handshake.

I hadn’t even fought for it, because somewhere deep down, I knew I was already too hollowed out to hold someone else's hope. After a year or two, I realized my wife didn’t even like me. She just loved my title.

So, I focused on my work, even though it made me sour and desperate to feel something.

And then came Fifi.

Bright, stubborn, ridiculous Fifi.

With her glitter and muffins and chickens, who might be possessed.

She’d tilted my world off its axis.

Made me laugh like I hadn’t in years.

Made me feel wanted —not for what I did, or what I could provide, but just... me.

And yet even standing in her kitchen, listening to her talk about that dreamy, chaotic, perfectly imperfect life, I couldn’t see myself inside it without breaking something.

Because what if I tried?

What if I came in with all my broken pieces, all my hesitation, all my long-haul emotional damage, and it was too much?

What if I disappointed her?

What if I left a kid standing at the front door with a packed lunch and a note from the school reminding me about a science fair I’d forgotten?

What if I became him ?

My father’s voice crept in—low, slurred, full of regret disguised as cruelty.

“You’ll never be the guy who gets it right, Ben. Too damn careful. Too quiet.”

I sucked in a sharp breath and shook it off.

No. I wasn’t him.

But I wasn’t sure I was the man Fifi needed either.

Because she deserved someone who ran toward that dream, not someone who needed a five-point checklist and thirty therapy sessions to believe he could be part of it.

I crouched by the tree line, picked up a stone, and tossed it down the incline, watching it bounce through brush and disappear.

My phone buzzed.

A text from my brother.

Still breathing?

I stared at the words.

Fifi was giving me every reason to stay.

But everything in me was still wired to run.

And the worst part?

I didn’t want to.

I wanted to earn the dream she dared to say out loud.

I just wasn’t sure how.

I didn’t have the energy for a real phone call.

Not after standing in the woods trying to peel open my fears like some emotional puzzle box with no clear solution. Not after hearing Fifi describe her dreams with the kind of warmth and clarity that made my chest tighten in ways I didn’t want to admit.

But I still opened the messaging thread with Dustin.

Still alive.

Dustin wrote back.

Well, that’s disappointing.

I chuckled.

Funny.

And then he wrote back.

Did you find the muffin girl again?

Yeah .

Another text slid over. Was he interested?

And?

Complicated.

He answered immediately.

Aren’t they always? Just keep it light. You're on vacation, not auditioning for a Hallmark movie.

I stared at that last text, something sour coiling in my stomach.

Just keep it light.

That was always Dustin’s solution: to float above everything. Deflect, joke, drink, ghost. Repeat. I used to envy it, the way he slipped out of problems like water off a raincoat. But now, reading those six words, it hit me harder than expected.

He was our parents’ son.

Maybe not in the way I was, the loyal one, the fixer, the sober chauffeur on nights when one too many drinks went down, but in the way that let him vanish when things got heavy. Emotionally allergic. Always skipping town right when things began to matter.

I tapped a reply but never sent it.

Because what was I even hoping to get from him? Understanding? Advice?

The vibration of my phone in my hand shifted—a different rhythm.

Work email.

Then another.

Then four more.

I groaned and slid onto the edge of the bed in my room at the lodge, thumb scrolling through subject lines like a slow descent into madness.

URGENT: Pending Review Before COB

Re: Notice of Discovery – Jensen Review Needed

Hi Ben,

Need Final Redline Before Friday’s Hearing Deadline Moved – Updated Motion Template Required.

The last one had a bright red exclamation mark next to it.

Of course it did.

I rubbed my temple and opened the first thread. My inbox had gone from manageable to a flaming pile of legal nightmares overnight. Somehow, despite clearly marking my out of office , the entire firm seemed to interpret it as we’re just going to bother him slightly less often than usual.

I opened my laptop, told myself I’d just skim and flag the urgent ones.

Forty-five minutes later, I was still there.

Buried in briefs. Highlighting jargon. Making comments in tracked changes and rewriting lines that should’ve been caught by people who’d claimed to have passed the bar ten years ago.

The longer I stared at the screen, the easier it was to forget the soft look in Fifi’s eyes when she’d told me about wanting children, about building a home where barefoot kids collected eggs and named the chickens after pop stars.

That now felt like a world away.

Untouchable.

The digital kind of chaos I was used to made more sense. You could fix it. Check it off. Reply all and move on.

But feelings?

Honest conversations about futures and what kind of life you want to build with someone you’ve known for all of a week?

That was messier.

I clicked out of the window and let the laptop fall shut with a hollow thunk. The soft clack of the keys was almost too loud in the room’s sudden silence.

My phone buzzed again.

Another text from Dustin.

Told you not to overthink it. Just enjoy the ride.

I stared at the words.

Then locked the screen.

The thing was, I didn’t want to just enjoy the ride. I didn’t want Fifi to be just a summer distraction that I forgot about by October. I wanted to be better than that and more present than that. I wanted to be stronger than the fear chewing through my gut like acid.

But the truth was, I didn’t know how to be that person yet.

Not with this past.

Not with this career.

Not with a family legacy I’d never really unpacked.

I leaned back on the bed, closed my eyes, and let the questions stack up around me like another inbox full of emotional blind spots.

Because if I didn’t figure it out soon?

I was going to lose something real.

I should’ve just turned it off.

Unplugged. Powered down. Thrown it in the lake and blamed it on a rogue otter.

But no. I opened my laptop again and immediately regretted every single life choice that led me to this moment.

The screen flickered awake like a smug little gremlin, and Outlook greeted me with its usual overzealous flair—blaring banners, subject lines in all caps, and three chat pop-ups from junior associates asking for clarification on things I had already explained twice before I left.

I took a deep breath, braced myself, and began scrolling.

The first email was titled:

RE: Super Duper Urgent – Client NEEDS final draft of motion, like… now?

I opened it.

Not only was it not urgent, it was barely comprehensible. Some intern had attached the wrong template, uploaded an outdated statute citation, and managed to cc a partner who hadn’t worked at the firm in four years.

My eye twitched.

The next email came from Stacey in finance:

Hey! Quick question, do you remember the client code for the Hillerman account? We can’t seem to find it anywhere. NBD if not. :)

I stared at that cheerful little smiley face like it was mocking my existence.

Hillerman was a case we closed last year.

The file had been archived, boxed, and stored.

Yet somehow, this was now my problem. The client's case number now had an x at the end.

Simple as that. Something we should all be aware of by now.

I moved on.

Client call rescheduled. Can you make 8:15 a.m. EST tomorrow? It should only take an hour or two!

I resisted the urge to bang my forehead on the keyboard.

That would be 7:15 a.m. my time on vacation.

Another ping. Another notification. Another well-intentioned disaster with the subject line: “Need your eyes on this real quick.”

Real quick, my ass.

They needed more than my eyes. They needed a miracle and probably a babysitter.

I closed the lid of the laptop slowly, like I might scare the gremlins back into hiding.

It didn’t work.

I stared at the ceiling of the lodge’s guest room, the sunlight filtering in through the curtain in warm stripes, and all I could think was: Why am I doing this?

This wasn’t supposed to be my life. The constant tension. The email-induced ulcers. The Sunday nights were lost to document review, and the Monday mornings were filled with meetings that could have been handled via email, if anyone knew how to write one.

And now, here I was, sitting in the middle of a dream I didn’t even know I’d had until I arrived, until I met Fifi, and I was ruining it one “urgent” ping at a time.

She made it look so simple. Honest. Joyful. She worked harder than anyone I knew, but she laughed while she did it. She smiled with her whole face. And her dreams? They were rooted in love, community, and connection. Not billable hours.

And here I was. Ruled by a damn inbox and a title I wasn’t even sure I cared about anymore.

My phone buzzed again.

Text from an associate I barely knew.

“Sorry to bug, but where do I find the PDF generator plugin?”

I stared at the screen.

Typed: “Ctrl+P.”

Then deleted it.

Typed: “You’re kidding, right?”

Deleted that, too.

Closed the laptop again.

Tighter this time.

This wasn’t the kind of life I wanted to bring back to Wisconsin. Not to her front porch. Not to a kid she might want to raise someday, who’d be stuck watching me stress-eat microwave dinners at midnight and snap at emails written in Comic Sans.

I wanted more than that.

No, I wanted less of this.

Fewer urgent flags, fewer nights spent hunched over briefs no one would remember a week later. And more…

More Fifi.

More stolen kisses and glitter-smeared counters and chickens named after celebrities.

More mornings where her laugh was the first sound I heard and not my alarm screaming me into another 12-hour day.

But first?

I needed to survive this inbox.

Or at least not let it swallow me whole.

I cracked my knuckles, opened the laptop again, and this time, instead of responding to the emails, I clicked open a blank draft.

Subject line: Out of Office – Extended.

And just for once, I meant it.