Page 119 of The Bossy One

She dug in her bag and produced a folder of what looked like sketches for a picture book. Underneath, I recognized Olivia’s words.

Pride and pain mixed equally inside of me.

I turned the pages carefully, newly awed that Olivia could create something like this. It wasn’t until the end that I noticed the words changing from what I remembered. The last ending had been about how you could always remember the advice of the people you loved who were gone, and how those words would guide you through.

This ending was different. In this one, the duckling realized that sometimes he would encounter situations his mom hadn’t given him advice for. But in those moments, he could listen to his own heart, because he knew the people who loved him had raised him to have a good, smart heart.

My hands tightened involuntarily on the pages.

It was what I’d told Olivia in the garden.

I’d thought she wanted to show me the change in her book as a way of re-establishing our casual online friendship.

But what if she’d been showing it to me to tell me to follow my heart?

“Breathe, Declan,” Mum said.

I inhaled sharply, the warm scents of a summer afternoon flooding me. I felt like I was coming back to life. Suddenly, the world was full of hope. And it was fucking beautiful.

Olivia was giving me permission to follow her one more time. And this time, I wasn’t going to waste my shot.

39

OLIVIA

Exactly six days after I told Molly I needed to see Declan one more time, I found myself racing through the Minneapolis airport to get to my gate. One thing after another had gone wrong this morning. If I missed my flight because my rideshare driver didn’t believe in maps…

I skidded to a halt in front of my gate just in time to hear the announcement that my flight had been delayed by an hour and a half.

Oh.

Well, that was anticlimactic, I thought.

On the bright side, now I had time to eat real food.

I craned my neck until I spotted a coffee shop a few gates down.

As I strolled to the coffee shop, I checked Snug. I’d been corresponding with a potential sponsor, and I wanted to see if they’d gotten back to me. But when I opened the app, I found hundreds of notifications. At first I thought it was some kind of tech glitch.

Then I thought a bunch of spammers had left hundreds of comments on my blog. I scrolled, confused, until one comment popped out at me.

Love your voice! I’m so glad @DeclanByrneOfficial included you in his top ten freshest voices. He hasn’t done one of those in forever.

Three clicks later, I was scrolling through the most recent post from Declan’s official Snug account. He’d done a post a few hours ago shouting out ten blogs on Snug.

I came in at #2.

The competitive part of me was indignant until I saw that #1 was a UN ambassador literally saving the world from climate change.

Which, you know, fair enough.

As I clicked back to my blog, the magnitude of what he’d done for me sank in. My follower count had already risen by 92%. My engagement rate was through the roof.

If my numbers kept going up like this… It would change the kind of sponsors I could attract. It gave me more power.

It gave meoptions.

I’d broken his heart in an airport. But he was still going out of his way to make my life easier.

---