How I feel about Declan Pierce.
The question I’ve been avoiding for three weeks, the answer that’s been growing stronger despite every rational reason to protect my heart.
I’m completely, irrevocably in love with him.
I love his willingness to question everything his father taught him about business success. I love his commitment to learning traditional dances and helping with community dishes. I love the way he looked at Highland’s families like they mattered, like their gathering place was worth preserving even when preservation wasn’t profitable.
I love that he spent two weeks arranging Highland’s salvation while I spent two weeks proving I could survive without his help.
Most of all, I love that he found a way to honor both Highland’s community and the principles we discovered together during our impossible collaboration.
“I love him,” I tell Rosa quietly. “Despite everything, because of everything, I love Declan Pierce.”
“Good,” Rosa says with satisfaction. “Because that young man is going to need to hear that almost as much as you need to say it.”
Which means I need to figure out what I’m going to say to the man who just proved that some love stories are worth fighting for, even when the fight takes longer than anyone expects.
Especially when the fight takes longer than anyone expects.
18
By now,three hours after the news officially broke, Maya should know.
Yet I don’t expect her to call—even as I can’t help but glance at my silent phone sitting on the garden table beside a tray of tomato seedlings I’ve been transplanting since the sun rose.
It rang nonstop for the first hour after the news broke—reporters wanting statements, Pierce Enterprises executives demanding explanations, legal teams scrambling to put together the final paperwork for the press conference in two hours.
By the fifteenth call, I had to set it down on the patio table, needing space to think, to work with my hands, to do something that creates rather than destroy.
For three years as Pierce Enterprises’ CEO, I spent my mornings reviewing demolition schedules and profit projections. Today, I’m planting heirloom tomatoes in soil my grandfather tended forty years ago, and somehow this feels like the most important work I’ve done in months.
I don’t expect Maya to thank me for buying Highland. In her position, I wouldn’t thank someone for solving a problem with money that could have been applied months ago. What I hope—what I’ve been hoping while transplanting seedlings and mulching flower beds—is that she’ll understand that Highland’s salvation wasn’t about providing rescue. It was about honoring the legal framework she’d already created.
Because that’s what changed everything—learning that Maya had spent two weeks researching community land trusts, that she’d used her father’s life insurance money to hire the best legal team in California, that all the documentation was ready and waiting for someone to provide the capital. Maya hadn’t given up—she’d been building the solution I was too blind to see.
As the morning air carries the scent of jasmine and fresh earth I barely appreciated before I met her, Pierce Enterprises’ corporate language of “development opportunities” and “underutilized properties” feels foreign now, like vocabulary from a life I’ve outgrown.
Instead, I’m pressing soil around a Cherokee Purple tomato plant while wondering what it would taste like when harvested in a few months. Considering I no longer have a job, I’ll have all the time in the world.
The sound of the doorbell ringing pulls me out of my reveries and for a moment, I consider ignoring it. The press conference isn’t for two hours and I’m not ready to field more questions about why I walked away from my father’s company to buy back a community center. Besides, the garden feels like a sanctuary—the first place I’ve been able to think clearly since resigning as CEO a week ago.
But the bell rings again, followed by a familiar voice calling my name.
Maya.
I stand quickly, brushing soil from my hands on the old gardening clothes I threw on this morning—jeans with holes in the knees, a faded UCLA T-shirt that’s seen better decades. Not exactly CEO attire, but I’m not a CEO anymore.
I walk around the side of the house to find Maya standing at my front door, wearing jeans and a Highland Community Center T-shirt, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her expression is unreadable, but there’s something in her posture—not anger, exactly, but a controlled energy that suggests she’s been thinking as hard as I have.
“Maya.” I stop a few feet away, suddenly aware of the dirt under my fingernails and the soil stains on my clothes. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“We need to talk.” Her voice is steady, controlled. “About Highland. About the Navarro Community Trust. About the fact that you apparently used my legal work to buy the building I’ve been trying to save for six months.”
The accusation should sting, but instead it feels like relief. She knows. She understands that Highland’s salvation wasn’t my idea—it was hers, activated by my resources.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “I did use your legal work. Every document, every city approval, every piece of the framework you created with Kemp & Associates. Highland exists as a community land trust because you built the legal structure that made it possible.”
“How did you know about Kemp & Associates?” Maya steps closer, studying my expression. “How did you know I’d been working on community land trust establishment?”
