Rewrite My Story Quotes

I don't get to rewrite my story; I just have to stumble to the end of it.

I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it's because I don't want to keep them for myself. You don't like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I'm wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

It takes one person to rewrite the history book.

I’m keeping my love story, not because it included both martyr and sacrifice, or because it’s the story I wanted, it’s because I would never rewrite it. And I would live it all over again just for the chance to sing with him.

Our beliefs are merely stories in our minds that we ourselves wrote long ago. Knowing that, don’t you feel empowered to rewrite them if they no longer serve you? Scan your mind for viruses called fears, anxieties, judgments, doubts, hatred and despair, and put a little note next to them that says “Outdated; no longer valid.” I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I think I’m gonna go out there and make some more! —Anonymous

My journey, however, has followed a far less predictable story: stalled chapters, unexpected plot twists, and dozens of rewrites that have left the ending more than a little uncertain.

I love you, and it's driving me crazy to see you so upset. I want to fix it, and I know I can't. But what I want to do is rewrite this whole world so you can fix it. I want to come up with a story that all the world will choose to celebrate, and in it, the people we love will never get sick, and the people we love will never be sad for long, and there would be unlimited frozen hot chocolate. Maybe if it were up to me I wouldn't have the whole world collectively believe in Santa Claus, but I would definitely have them collectively believe in something, because there is a messed-up kind of beauty in the way we can bend over backward to make life seem magical when we want to. In other words, after giving it some thought , I think that reality has the distinct potential to complete suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy. In my life, that's you. And if it takes dressing up like Santa to get that across to you, then so be it.

Jesus didn’t have to extend His love. He didn’t have to think of me when He went up on that cross. He didn’t have to rewrite my story from one of beauty to one of brokenness and create a whole new brand of beauty. He simply didn’t have to do it, but He did. He bought me. He bought me that day He died, and He showed His power when He overcame death and rose from the grave. He overcame my death in that moment. He overcame my fear of death in that unbelievable, beautiful moment, and the fruit of that death, that resurrection, and that stunning grace is peace. It is the hardest peace, because it is brutal. Horribly brutal and ugly, and we want to look away, but it is the greatest, greatest story that ever was. And it was, and it is.

But the truth is, I don’t have my mother. I never will. I don’t get to rewrite my story; I just have to stumble to the end of it.

You can’t take away the past; you can only add to the narrative. There is a narrative about Muslims that already exists. I’m not here to undo or rewrite history. That is propaganda or an impossibility. What I, and others, can do is expand on the notion of what it means to be Muslim, continue the story line that survives alongside us.

I want to hold her, to tell her how deep down I hate to see her cry. But right now I can’t see through the anger—the hurt—of her pretending that for one summer, she and I weren’t each other’s world. For me, she stayed my world every day after.

A crucial step on this journey is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I come from, where I am heading, and what is happening to me right now.

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance.

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance.

She’s my everything. My ruining, and I want everything she’ll give me.

For my entire life, my heart has only beat for one person. That’s you, Cade Jennings. Even without knowing if you’d ever be mine, I knew I was yours.

Her words unravel me. I haven’t even inched inside her yet, and I know no one else could ever compare to her. She’s my everything. My ruining, and I want everything she’ll give me.

Spread those legs open and wide for me, baby. It’s time for me to show you how much better my tongue is compared to your fingers.

I do.” “Ask me again if I’m yours.” “Are you mine?” “My heart only beats like that for you.” I press her hand against my chest, proving to her that no one controls my heartbeats like she does.

Look at you being such a good fucking girl, coating my cock in your cum. You’re doing so fucking good at making sure my cock is nice and wet, making it easier to slide into your perfect pussy.

After I left, I cried myself to sleep so many times, wondering where things went wrong. I obsessed over the idea of you being my world and I was nothing to you. You can’t tell me years later that you loved me.

When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

Your pinkies would be touching across the pillows, and I could tell that no matter the fact you had just lost a mother and your father was distant, that you were going to be okay. Because of my baby boy, you were going to be okay.

I can’t keep it a secret any longer.” I grab her arms, pulling her closer to my body. “I fell for you so hard and fast, it was almost like that love had always been there. I loved you, Goldie. I loved you so fucking much that it killed me to watch you leave.

I sigh, wishing I could be honest and tell her I think she’ll be the only person I love my entire life. I think the ghost of our memories will haunt me on the ranch. It’ll be bittersweet to watch her make every single one of her dreams come true without me in her life.

My eyes burn with unshed tears from the reminder of how unbelievably hard that time of my life was. It felt like everything was going wrong and I couldn’t tell a soul—not even Pippa—what was happening. Nobody knew that I’d had my heart broken by a man who was my entire world.

But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it's also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I'll rewrite and understand on a future reading.

The experiment changed Sally’s life. In the following days she realised she has been through a ‘near-spiritual experience…what defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up…My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head…I hope you can sympathise with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes. I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did those voices come from?’7 Some of those voices repeat society’s prejudices, some echo our personal history, and some articulate our genetic legacy. All of them together, says Sally, create an invisible story that shapes our conscious decisions in ways we seldom grasp. What would happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion? 8

And in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, the inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely, if ever, admits it. And just as the government builds up a national myth with flags, icons and parades, so my inner propaganda machine builds up a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.

I pull her body into mine. My arms wrap around her, caging her in and pressing her to my heartbeat. Her tears don’t hurt the way they did last time. They still hurt, but it’s different. Last time it was so heartbreaking to see her cry it felt like a piece of my soul died having to hurt her. This time, it feels like a piece of my heart is leaving, but I have the comfort and assurance to know that it’ll return.

You told me to leave!” she shouts, her hands angrily thrashing through the air. “You told me to leave and that you wanted nothing to do with me once I did. So that’s what I did, Cade. I left. Even though it broke my heart to leave things how we did.” She gasps for air as she tries to keep a grip on her emotions. “You can’t pretend like we know anything about each other now. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter.

Why the fuck would I want you to stay away when I was in love with you?” Her mouth falls open. “What?” she asks, her voice breaking. I let out a dejected sigh, anger and sadness coursing through my veins. I shake my head. “You knew that.” “No.” She shakes her head back and forth, her eyes misting over. “I didn’t know. I hoped. God, I wanted that more than anything. But I asked you if you loved me and you told me no. How can I trust you now?

I’m not sure what to say about this book and this series and this piece of my soul. I’ve spent almost every day of the last eight years with Ty and Zane, and saying good-bye to them as this series comes to a close is bittersweet. My world will be an emptier place without them. Ty and Zane started their lives as a message between myself and my former cowriter. A message asking, “What should we do now?” “How about murder?” was my reply, and that was that. We wrote Cut & Run, and we finished it with enough content to fill two books, and in the end Ty and Zane walked off into the sunset, happy and in love. It didn’t feel right. After a day to let the ending settle, it was painfully obvious that this was not the proper end of the story. There was more to tell, and the rewrite began. A story arc formed—a tortuous, cruel story that would force Ty and Zane to work for their happy ending. It

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.

It means neither one of us can hide the fact that we know every single fucking thing there is to know about the other person. Time, miles, nothing will change that I know you, Goldie. I know you almost better than I know myself. And I know for a fucking fact that you’re lying.” “How?” “Because I know how much it fucking hurts my soul to see another man look at you the way I look at you. To see him touch you the way I want to touch you. And I know that after every fucking thing between us, even after you leaving me, that you feel the same.

Nine years ago you made a wish, and I desperately wanted to know what you’d wished for. I wanted it to be for me—for us. I want to spend every birthday with you, be your every birthday wish, Goldie. Because you’ll always be mine. I want to be your forever. There isn’t a version of my future that doesn’t have you in it.” He taps his chest, hitting against his heart. “You’re my entire heart. My entire world. I love you so much that it feels like I live and breathe you. Marry me, Goldie? Make me the luckiest man in the world and become my wife?

Like Willow, we all can honor our pain and then move toward something more joyful. We can focus on our resilience and remember our joys or sorrows. We can craft stories that tell us we are loved, strong, resilient, respected, worthy, generous, forgiven, and happy. We all have such stories if only we can uncover them.... To rewrite our story, we need effort and imagination. We can access imagination by journaling, painting, music, or art. One of my favorite things about writing is that I get to tell a second story about whatever happens to me. And, in this second story I can shape events in ways that are more beautiful and happiness-producing. Indeed, what is all art if not an attempt to tell a better story? Some of our stories bring out the best in us, whereas others induce despair, fear or anger. We can ask ourselves questions that remind us of our kindness, hard work, and strength over the years. We can explore our uncelebrated virtues and our survival skills.

I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times. I would have all these wonderful shiny bulbs, each self-contained with nothing to hang them on. But I would stay with the characters, caring for them, getting to know them better and better, suiting up each morning and working as hard as I could, and somehow, mysteriously, I would come to know what their story was. Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. Some

Our conversation went a little like this: “God, if I lay down my need for those who hurt me to be punished, it doesn’t mean that what they did is okay, right?” “Right.” “So, just to be clear, we are in agreement that what they did is wrong, correct?” “Kim, what they did was wrong. I’m sorry you were hurt.” “When I surrender this to You and release those who hurt me, You know for sure that I’m not saying that I agree with them, right?” “Do you trust Me?” “I trust You, God, but do I still get to be strong? Does surrendering and letting go mean that I’m weak?” “Are you relying on your strength or Mine? You are strong when you trust in Me and rely on My strength.” Ugh. And just like that, God broke through another layer of my old need to protect myself through control. It felt so important to me to be strong. My entire childhood I had to be strong for my mom and siblings. I had to be strong to be brave and defend myself. I had to be strong so fear would not cripple me. And it seemed to me that to trust in God, to surrender, to depend on His strength, to forgive those who hurt me, and to not demand punishment meant I could no longer be strong. I hated that! As I was pondering why this upset me so much, another lie was exposed—the lingering belief that no one can take care of me like I can. Part of me still thought I couldn’t really trust God with my heart and emotions.

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.

It's troubling at first to realize that our life events in the order they happened will never make good fiction. That's what many people who attend my writing workshops want to turn into a book—“ this happened to me, and then this happened, and then this, and it was unbelievable!” While those experiences won't make good fiction in their given state, the good news is that you still have the right stuff to craft a compelling story. It's what you've learned from your life events and what you want more than anything that drive the plot, not the events themselves.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

The story of my marriage and motherhood is not unusual: a life defined by a name, a name conferred by someone other than me. Most women I knew had taken on their husband’s name either at the time of the wedding or after the birth of their children. A few had retained their maiden name, with a handful agonizing over the decision.

There’s always a choice and that choice begins with words—the stories people tell you and the stories you tell yourself. How you choose to build the foundation of your life will determine how well it stands up against the naysayers who try to trip you up.

She’s always been my kryptonite, my favorite drug and sobriety was never an option.

We both know my words were harsh. The hidden meaning behind them was clear. She should’ve been home more. It broke my mom’s heart that she never came back to visit. It was low of me to bring attention to it, but it needed to be said. Really, I’m just angry with her because not only did she leave this place and leave Pippa and my mom behind—but she left me, too. And even though I told her to go all those years ago, I never could’ve imagined she’d take me so seriously.

You don’t know me anymore.” I know my words come out harsh, but I can’t help it with her. I am angry at her. There are so many reasons for me to be upset. The biggest one being I hate that after all these years apart, I still feel an intense pull toward her. “You don’t know what my looks mean. Maybe that’s just how I always look.

Her smile is breathtaking. It’s like a punch to the gut to have a woman like Mare look at you like that. It’s something you want to keep and cherish forever, but terrifying when you know you nowhere near deserve it. She runs her thumb along my jawline. There’s so much affection in her eyes. “You didn’t do anything I didn’t ask you to do.

Nerves course through my body as I get off the bed and tiptoe to my bedroom door, my mind fixed on making my way to Cade. I know I shouldn’t be doing this. Before anything else happens between us, we need to have a long talk about what we are, about what’s happening between us. But I doubt that’ll happen.

He proves that I have no hope of being anyone’s other than his. My heart, body—my entire being—is his. At one point, I may have actually hated him. Or maybe I hated how much I was his, even when I thought he didn’t want to be mine.

I did leave him. I followed my dreams and I’m happy, despite the missing piece of me that had always stayed behind with him.

I love you. I’ve been in love with you my entire life, Cade Jennings. This summer was the best summer of my life because of you. And if you felt anything close to what I feel for you, you wouldn’t let us end this way.

You can’t,” Mare sobs. “You can’t tell me you don’t love me because I know this isn’t all in my head. Love like this doesn’t have to be talked about. It’s so much more powerful than words. It can be felt and I feel that you love me like I love y—

It’s clear he still wants something to happen between us. He made that obvious by kissing me and being upset by me stopping it. He showed me the house that was clearly planned out with me in mind—with my comments all those years ago.

All this time I’ve thought Cade forgot everything we were but he was here living in those memories every day of his life. I want to believe every word he’s telling me. I want to hope that things aren’t really over between us, but I’m scared to have my heart broken again. When I left, I was vulnerable with him. I laid out every single one of my feelings, and he stomped on them. He crushed us. He crushed me. No matter what he says now, I can’t get over the fear of ending up in the exact same position as last time.

Now if only I could figure out my real life. The things about me that aren’t fiction. Starting with Cade and his intentions by giving me the hat. It’s clear he isn’t hiding the feelings he’s harbored all these years. He’s all but admitted that he wasn’t over me. That he didn’t feel like things were over between us.

Cade leans in, trapping my lips between his before I can get out any kind of answer for him. It’s best that way, I was about to tell him that loving him never felt like a choice to me—it feels embedded in my soul. It just is. No choice, no accident. But that would’ve been me confessing I’ve fallen for him, and I don’t know if we’re ready for that yet.

She nods and fuck if I wasn’t already madly in love with her, I know that this moment would be the reason I fell. It’s the way she tenderly rubs my cheekbone before her hands travel down my bare chest that does me in. I don’t stop her when her slender fingers play with the waistband of my pants.

Cade,” she whispers. There’s so much unsaid in the way she says my name.

Cade,” I mutter, not knowing what else there is to say. He was the first man I was ever with—the only one I’ve ever loved. I would’ve spent the rest of my life with only ever having him and only him. It was him that made the decision to ruin everything we could’ve been.

The moment I saw that photo in his hat, every reason I was denying him disappeared from my mind. He hurt me more than anyone has ever hurt me when he forced me to leave. But I’m learning that maybe we were too young to handle how strong our feelings were.

Goldie?” The nickname caresses deep parts of me. I forgot how much I’d missed the nickname, how much I still love it after all the time and hurt that’s passed between us. “Hm?” “You’re sleeping in my bed tonight. If I don’t find you at my door, don’t think I won’t come and get you and put you where you belong.” “And where is that?

The old version of me never could’ve expected how hard it would be to return to see the boy she thought she’d get to love forever. I focus on the marigold tucked into my hair. It’d been the reason Cade wanted to take the photo in the first place. My head rests against Dolly as I smile at Cade, the flower tucked right above my ear.

My eyes squeeze shut. My mind rushes with all of our memories from this summer. We were happy. I loved him, and there were times he had me believing he loved me too. Our moments together weren’t one-sided. I was convinced he felt something too.

I wonder if he finds them or not. I hope not. Even after all the years we’ve known each other, I was hoping the time apart made it so he couldn’t see past my poker face.

You called me a coward when you left this town.” He laughs sarcastically. “It’s funny because the only fucking coward I see here is you. I’m trying to open up to you, to be honest with you—something I remember you begging for in the past—and here you are, lying to my fucking face. Do you really think that low of me, Goldie? Do you really think I wouldn’t know when you’re lying?

I’m done,” I say exhausted, already turning my body toward the tent. I’m going to go to bed and wake up tomorrow and pretend that my heart never wanted him so desperately. He clearly doesn’t deserve it.

I’m tired of pretending that my day doesn’t begin and end with thoughts of you,” he admits, his chest heaving up and down.

As I adjust my body, getting comfortable in his warm embrace, I fight the urge to tell him I’d lie here with him forever. I’d count every star to infinity to stay locked in this moment with him.

He’d been busy sulking in a corner, pinning me with an angry glare as I’d made a wish for my heart to get over him. What a silly thought. My heart has always been Cade’s. One simple little birthday wish wasn’t going to change that.

I’m tired of that nickname, too,” I point out. If he ever stopped calling me that, I think my heart would break, but he doesn’t have to know that.

I’d give anything for you to want to stay, runs through my head. I’d give anything for us to have more than just this summer.

It seems obvious now that Goldie has always been my world. I’d do anything for her. It’s why I opened my bedroom door to comfort her each and every night—even when I knew I shouldn’t.

In the years since you’ve left, I’ve been working, drowning myself in it, really. I lost you partly because I wanted to keep the legacy of the ranch my great-grandfather created. I had to make damn sure I attempted to make my choice worth it.

She’s looking at me the way she used to. The way I’ve missed every single day since she left. “And right now my favorite cupcake flavor of Pip’s is blueberry lemon.” “I had one of those this morning.” “They’re fucking phenomenal.” I pause for a moment. “And working some more.

I’m tired of fighting myself over how much I think about you. I’m tired of telling myself that I shouldn’t look at my little sister’s best friend the way I look at you. I’m really just tired of pretending that my entire head isn’t full of you and only you.

My heart threatens to erratically beat right out of my chest at the rush of adrenaline that comes from finally kissing the man I’ve been in love with for years.

I wish that Cade and I can figure this out together. I wish for this to be the best summer of my life. My biggest wish is that I get to keep him once this summer ends.

You don’t get to tell me what to do. I’m the one in charge right now. And if you want to end us, If you want to demolish the most perfect thing I’ve ever felt to nothing, then you’re going to do it to my face.

I close the distance between us. I’m not going to give her the luxury of lying to me from afar. She knows exactly what this house means to me—what it once meant to us. It’s hard to even look at her, I’m so fucking upset with her. I’m done with her pretending that she doesn’t remember our past. It’s so fucking ingrained in my mind, and in my heart, that I can’t fucking fathom that she doesn’t remember things that have haunted me for years.

My thumb gently brushes over the photo as I try to figure out what it means that he still has it. Not only had he held on to it for so long, but he’d kept it tucked into his favorite hat. He’s worn that hat every single day I’ve been here. Has it been there the whole time? Has he had it with him every day for years?

it’s hard to imagine I didn’t. Maybe something has always been there, it just needed time to come to the forefront of my mind and heart.

I like being yours and you being mine. I want to be yours in every way.” Her voice is timid but sure as she arches deeper into my touch.

I'm keeping my love story, not because it included both martyr and sacrifice, or because it's the story I wanted, it's because I would never rewrite it. And I would live it all over again just for the chance to sing with him.

When Cade brought me to this house the other day, I wasn’t ready to see it. My heart couldn’t take knowing he’d been here in Sutten building a life for himself—a life he hoped I’d be in—while I was miles and miles away believing he never loved me.

That he’d loved me all along. I’d gone so long believing I was the only one who left heartbroken after our summer together. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that I left this town to avoid him because I couldn’t face him not loving me back, when all along he was here, unable to let us go. Building a house for us.

I’m happy because the only man who has ever owned my heart wants to spend forever with me.

I left her standing in that airport four years ago, and it still hurts to think about. It’s like a bruise that won’t heal, one that throbs and aches no matter how much time passes. I rub my chest, trying to soothe the pain.

For a few short seconds, I remember why I gave her the nickname Goldie in the first place. Aside from it being a shortened version of her name, she always reminded me of the sun. She brought light into my life. And for right now, even if it’s only for a brief moment, she brings a little bit of light into a darkness.

That wasn’t the truth. I could pour myself into the book because it was my hurt and heartbreak in those pages. It was my anguish. It was my story. Well, our story.

The marigold was my own way of keeping you close to me. I know I did some things that really hurt you, and I hate that I did that, but I never stopped loving you, Goldie. Not for a single second.

Aside from it being a shortened version of her name, she always reminded me of the sun. She brought light into my life. And for right now, even if it’s only for a brief moment, she brings a little bit of light into a darkness.

I hear the man I’m in love with is building me a house with a breakfast nook I’d love to write at.” “I’ll build you ten,” I say through the emotion clogging my throat.

Dad…” I croak, knowing if I had to choose, I’d do the same thing. Making my dad proud—keeping this ranch in the family—is one of the things I want most in this world. But what I want the most, is Mare. My Goldie.

Maybe you’d come back, maybe he’d laugh more, maybe you two would find each other again. But that didn’t happen. At least it hasn’t yet—until tonight. Tonight I looked in my son’s eyes, and I saw hope.

I don’t fucking care how we make it happen, but soon, you’ll be in my arms again. You hear me?” I nod because I couldn’t agree more.

I don’t know everything that happened between the two of you. One moment you both were happy and the next moment you wouldn’t come home, and Cade shut down. I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad, please know that, I’m telling you this next part because you need to know that whatever my sweet, quiet, stubborn son has done in the past, he loves you with his entire being.

For the both of you, I hope that love can overcome anything that’s happened between the two of you. From the moment your momma died, I’ve always wanted to take care of you, Marigold. I love you like I love my own children.

My shoulders shake as I try to take a deep breath. It’s a useless attempt, the more I try not to cry, the harder I cry. There’s so many feelings coursing through me that I don’t know what to think or how to feel. I feel guilty for never coming back to Sutten knowing what waited for me there. I feel so sad that I can’t tell Linda to her face that Cade and I have found each other again.