Promise Me This (Wilder Family, #3)

by Karla Sorensen

We can’t fix all the world’s problems by ourselves, but even one small, nice thing can change someone’s world.

Watching your kid get older was the strangest double-edged sword. Feeling your heart break daily because they didn’t depend on you quite as much while wanting to cry from how fucking proud you were that they weren’t a total asshole human being.

He wasn’t the guy to wrap me up in a hug or tell me it would be okay, but I was still thankful for what he’d just given me. Insight, more than we realized, was one of the greatest gifts in being able to let go of your past. We could study it and pick it apart, but until we got some of those missing pieces, almost an element of our own story could haunt us.

came because you’re always the person I want to be around when life feels unsteady.”

There was only one reason her happiness would matter this much to me. Why I’d face down everything that came her way. Not because I was the prince or the knight in her story—but because I was the dragon wrapping itself around the thing it loved most. Breathing fire and providing armor and ripping down every stronghold with the snap of jaws and fueled by the fierce way she’d embedded herself into me.

The gift was that he remembered. The gift was in feeling seen. That the things that mattered to me mattered to him. It was the kind of gift a best friend gives you. There was no requirement that attraction or love or Thoughts or Feelings had to be attached. Gifts like this one came from a deep, intrinsic knowing of who the recipient was, and what would speak loudest to their heart.

Speaking out loud, in the moment, was shining a spotlight on all the pieces of my heart that I’d never really shown, and I couldn’t entirely be sure that he, that we, were ready for that.

It was everything, this kiss. It was the kind that shrank the entire world to that one perfect moment, because his mouth on mine was a dream I didn’t know I’d never had. Every cliché I’d tried to avoid was spinning on a wheel in my head. Fireworks, explosions, rearranged atoms, they were all present and accounted for.

It wasn’t that disagreements didn’t exist and everything was easy, but the Wilders weathered the hard because at the anchor of that family was acceptance. It was love rooted deep, without conditions and without reservation.

The biggest changes in our life always come with a little fear and a lot of honesty.”

“You look at me like I’m your whole world,” I admitted quietly. “Like it almost hurts to feel something this big for someone and not know if it’s just you.”