If there was one thing I had learned, it was this:
Love doesn’t always ruin your plans all at once.
Sometimes it just sits beside them.
Smiling.
Patient.
Beautiful enough that you start shifting things around to make room for it.
And before you know it, your life has been rearranged.
Not destroyed.
Not yet.
Just… altered.
Softly.
Quietly.
Like it was your idea all along.
That was the scariest part.
Not that Landon asked me to stay.
Not even that I wanted to.
It was that somewhere between late-night drives and songs written on crumpled notebook paper and the way he looked at me like I was the answer to something he had been searching for his whole life—
I had started believing maybe I could want something different too.
Not less.
Just different.
And if I said it enough t
