TAYLOR: Chapter 93

TAYLOR: Chapter 93
This story is about Taylor, the girl who became friends with Maisie and Hattie and had the perfect life!
The Life We Built
There was a time when my life seemed too unlikely to belong to me. I was the girl who chose the library over the bleachers, who kept a paperback tucked inside her algebra book and knew more about the Civil War than anyone had asked to know. In high school, I was quiet in the way people often mistake for emptiness. I noticed everything. The cracked blue paint on the lockers. The way teachers paused before saying something difficult. The titles of books other people carried.
I loved history because it made the present feel less permanent. Somewhere, people had stood in other rooms and believed their lives were settled, too. They had fallen in love, made mistakes, lost people, crossed oceans. Their stories waited in the library stacks, patient as old trees, and I could disappear into them whenever the cafeteria grew too loud.
I was not socially prominent. I did not go to parties unless someone I trusted promised to stay near me, and I had no talent for pretending to care about conversations that bored me. I thought my future would be made of books, sensible shoes, and a small apartment where no one moved my things without asking.
Then there was Eli.
Eli Cook was the kind of person everyone seemed to know. He played safety on the football team, carried himself with the easy confidence of someone used to being called across a room, and could make the principal laugh during assemblies. From a distance, we looked like a joke someone had begun telling before either of us arrived: the football player and the girl with the stack of library books.
Up close, he was different. Not secretly different, as if kindness were something he needed to hide, but more thoughtful than people bothered to notice. He remembered which teachers made me nervous. He listened when I talked about history, even when I explained the same battle from three different angles. Once, while we were studying in the library, I looked up from my notes and found him drawing a map of the Western Front in the margin of his chemistry worksheet.
“You put Paris in the wrong place,” I told him.
He glanced at the map. “I was going for emotional accuracy.”
“That is not a thing.”
“It is if I’m the one drawing it.”
I laughed so loudly that Mrs. Alvarez shushed us from behind the circulation desk. Eli smiled, but he lowered his voice and leaned closer to the table. He never made me feel like my interests were strange. He made room for them.
After practice, he often waited by the side entrance while I finished shelving books for my volunteer hours. He would be sweaty, muddy, and carrying his helmet under one arm, his hair flattened in odd directions. I would tell him about whatever I was reading, and he would ask questions that proved he had been listening.
“So the king just decided everyone should go to war?” he asked one October evening.
“Not exactly.”
“Good. Because that seems like a terrible management style.”
We became us in increments: shared fries after games, his jacket over my shoulders when the stadium lights shut off, long conversations in his truck with the heater rattling. He studied beside me before exams and let me quiz him on vocabulary. I went to his games, learned the rules, and cheered even when I still could not explain a blitz.
We were never opposites in the ways that mattered. Eli liked being surrounded by people, but he understood my need for quiet. I loved old stories, and he believed in making new ones. Somewhere between the library and the football field, we stopped wondering whether we made sense together.
After graduation, life did not pull us apart so much as test whether we knew how to keep choosing each other. There were college schedules, cheap takeout, missed calls, and the first arguments that lasted long enough to frighten us. We learned to apologize without keeping score. We learned that love was less like a lightning strike than a lamp left on in the window.
Eli proposed in the kitchen of the apartment we shared after college. The sink was full of dishes, I was wearing one of his old T-shirts, and he had burned the first batch of cinnamon rolls beyond saving. He did not get down on one knee. Instead, he stood across from me with flour on his cheek and said, “I know what I want my ordinary days to look like.”
My throat tightened. “Burned pastries?”
“You. The pastries can be negotiated.”
We married the following spring beneath a row of cottonwood trees. The ceremony was small, with our families in folding chairs and a breeze that kept lifting the edges of my vows. When Eli said he would choose me in the exciting years and the boring ones, I believed him because he had already been doing it. He had chosen me in grocery store aisles, during stomach bugs, in traffic, and over arguments about money.
Two years later, his job took us across Idaho, from the green, rain-dark hills near Moscow to the wide open country around Idaho Falls. We drove east with our belongings packed in the back of a rented truck and our little newborn girl asleep in her carseat.
The landscape changed by degrees. Forest gave way to wheat fields, then to long stretches of sagebrush and volcanic earth. The sky seemed too large to belong to any one person. I cried when we left our first apartment, then felt guilty for crying when we were supposed to be starting something wonderful.
Eli reached across the console and took my hand. “We’re not leaving everything,” he said. “We’re bringing us.”
In Idaho Falls, we rented a little house with crooked floors and a backyard where the wind moved through the grass like water. We bought secondhand furniture, argued over paint colors, and celebrated the first night the heat worked properly. Our life began there—not grandly, but piece by piece, in the spaces we made livable.
Now I worked, the bakery my friend Maisie owned on a corner where the windows fogged before sunrise. Maisie had a laugh that could fill the whole kitchen and a talent for turning every problem into something that could be solved with butter, patience, or both.
I started with orders and invoices, then learned the ovens, the proofing schedule, and the exact moment a loaf of sourdough stopped looking pale and began looking golden. The work steadied me. I liked the rhythm of it: flour dusting my wrists, timers chiming, trays sliding onto cooling racks. There was comfort in making something ordinary and good.
That morning, I was piping buttercream rosettes onto a row of lemon cupcakes while Maisie wrestled with a delivery invoice.
“You’re making those too pretty to eat,” she said.
“That sounds like a customer problem.”
“A serious one.”
I smiled and checked the time. June would start kindergarten in two weeks. At breakfast, she had worn her backpack around the kitchen while Eli packed her apple slices, insisting she needed to practice being ready.
“She’ll be fine,” he had said, kissing the top of her head.
“I know,” I told him. “I’m the one who won’t be.”
He had looked at me over June’s shoulder, his expression warm and amused. “Then I’ll walk you to the classroom, too.”
I had carried that promise with me into the bakery, along with the hope that this was only the beginning: school pictures, scraped knees, family dinners, a house that would slowly fill with evidence of a life well lived. I thought the future was waiting for us in a straight line.
The mixer turned on behind me with a low mechanical growl. Somewhere near the front counter, the bell above the door chimed, followed by a customer’s cheerful greeting. Maisie answered, and the bakery settled into its familiar morning music.
My phone rang in the pocket of my apron.
I almost ignored it. Eli knew I was working, and I assumed he was calling to remind me about something small: milk, a permission form, the kindergarten orientation. I wiped my fingers on a towel and looked at the screen.
The number was unfamiliar.
“Hello?”
There was a pause. Not a normal pause. A careful one.
“May I speak with Taylor Cook?”
My hand tightened around the phone. “This is Taylor.”
The woman on the other end introduced herself and said she was calling from the hospital. Words followed—accident, roadway, husband—but they seemed to arrive separately, loose and weightless, refusing to form a sentence.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Your husband did not survive.”
The mixer continued to turn.
For a moment, I understood nothing except the buttercream bag collapsing beneath my palm. A pale ribbon of frosting curled onto the counter. Someone laughed near the ovens. The front door opened, letting in a blade of cold air.
“No,” I said, though I did not know which part I was answering. “I’m sorry, can you—”
The woman repeated it gently. There had been an accident. Eli was gone. They needed me to come in, and someone would meet me there.
Gone.
The word moved through me without touching anything. It belonged to coats left on hooks and keys misplaced in drawers. It did not belong to Eli, who had kissed June goodnight less than twelve hours ago. Eli, who had promised to walk me to kindergarten. Eli, who was supposed to come home.
Maisie appeared beside me. Her face changed when she saw mine.
“Taylor?”
I lowered the phone, but I could not let go of it. “It was the hospital.”
She reached for my elbow. “What happened?”
I looked past her at the fogged windows, at the cupcakes lined up like tiny celebrations, at the life I had been carrying so confidently inside my chest.
“Eli is dead,” I said.
Maisie made a sound that was almost my name. Her arms came around me, but my body stayed rigid, unable to understand comfort. All I could think was that June would ask where her father was. I would have to kneel in front of our daughter and place this impossible word between us.
Outside, morning went on. Cars passed. The sky brightened over the roofs. Inside the bakery, the ovens breathed heat against my back, and the frosting on the counter began to soften.
I had spent my whole life believing the future was a place we entered together. Then, in the middle of an ordinary morning, it opened beneath my feet—and I was standing on the other side alone.