Ever After Awaits (Layla) novel Chapter 150

Chapter 150: Layla POV

The campus is busy later that afternoon.

:

72

The hum of conversations surrounds me, a mixture of laughter, rushed greetings, and the occasional phone call floating into the air. Various footsteps shuffle past me in every direction–heels clicking on the walkways, sneakers squeaking on the concrete where the sprinklers overshot their mark. The breeze smells faintly of jasmine from the freshly landscaped bushes, but it doesn’t quite reach me where I sit tucked away in a quiet alcove near the literature building.

I’m not hidden. But I’m not visible either. I’m waiting for my next class to begin with my one foot tucked beneath me, and an iced coffee sweating onto the concrete bench beside my bag. My notebook is open on my lap with the pen poised in my hand, but the ink hasn’t seeped into the paper in almost ten minutes.

I’m not really working. I just needed somewhere to exist quietly for a few minutes between my lectures–somewhere no one would ask me why I looked like I’d just stepped out of a fog I didn’t even know was heading my way.

The screen of my phone suddenly lights up in my lap with a familiar name. Xavier.

I don’t hesitate to answer immediately.

“Hey,” he says, his voice even. “I just wanted to give you the update directly. The court has acknowledged receipt of our response, and they scheduled a case management hearing.”

His words hit me with the subtle weight of a falling stone. I sit up straighter, my fingers tightening around the phone. “When?”

“Two to four weeks out,” he says calmly. “It’s standard procedure. We’ll get the formal date within a few days.”

It’s standard procedure. The process is starting. It means this thing is actually real.

My mouth opens, but there’s not much I can offer him in the way of a reply. “Thanks,” I say quietly, though my voice is tighter than I meant it to be. It sounds thin and brittle, as if it might crack if 1 continue talking for much longer.

I hang up before he can say anything else–before he can hear how my breath has started to shake. I’ll apologize later for my rudeness.

1/4

11:27 Sat, Sep 20

Chapter 150: Layla POV

:

72

The moment the call ends, the iced coffee beside me becomes intolerable. I take a sip anyway to try to ease my suddenly dry throat, but it tastes like a cardboard box and tattered nerves.

The world around me hasn’t changed. Students keep moving across campus. And laughter is still drifting across the quad.

But something deep inside me folds in on itself.

Because no matter how many times I tell myself it’s okay–that Xavier has a plan, that I’m not alone -there’s a cold sweat trickling between my shoulder blades.

I make it to my next class on autopilot.

The lecture hall feels too big, like an echo chamber where everything reverberates a little too loudly. Every cough, every page that gets flipped, and every scratch of a pen on paper feels like it’s brushing

against my already–frayed nerves.

The professor’s usual emotion–filled voice floats from the front of the room, something about comparative literary structures, using words I usually love, themes I’d typically highlight and annotate, and sink into like warm water.

But today, none of them land in my brain. They just bounce right off the static that’s buzzing around

in my skull.

At one stage, my pen slips out of my grip and rolls to the floor. I lean down to pick it up, but my hand is shaking. Badly, I might add.

I clench my fingers around the pen once it’s back in my hand and breathe in through my nose. Then

out through my mouth.

It doesn’t help.

My mother’s voice suddenly curls at the edges of my thoughts, sweet as poison, and sticky as honey. All her careful words, all her quiet threats, and all the years of learned silence wrapped in niceties.

And now this.

Now it’s legal. Now it’s cold and signed and stamped in black–and–white declarations. Now she’s trying to gut the one thing I have left of my dad. The one place that ever felt like home to me.

2/4

11:27 Sat, Sep 20

Chapter 150: Layla POV

And maybe if I’m being honest with myself–the last piece of me that hasn’t bent to her

completely.

A

72

“You okay?” someone whispers from beside me–a girl with kind eyes and a soft pink hoodie whose name I can’t remember right now.

I nod, but it’s too fast not to be fake. “Yeah,” I murmur, but my voice doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t

sound like me.

My chest tightens with a slow, cruel pressure, like someone cinching it in, inch by inch.

I swallow hard and focus on the notes I’m not taking, and hold the pen tighter even though I’m not writing anything down.

Even though my hands won’t stop shaking.

The moment I step out of the lecture hall of my midday class, I pause. Because they’re there.

AJ is leaning against a stone pillar just beyond the building’s stairs, his arms crossed, and his sunglasses dangling from the collar of his shirt. His eyes find mine instantly, and when they do, his expression softens almost instantly. He straightens, moves toward me with that easy, sure stride of his, and holds something out to me in one hand.

A takeaway coffee cup and a chocolate chip muffin.

“I figured you skipped lunch,” he says gently, and his voice is low and warm, like he’s trying to speak into the places inside me that feel hollow.

I blink. Look at his offering. And then up at him again before taking them.

Cade jumps up from the second–to–last step he was sitting on, sunlight practically stitched into his grin. “Mini bouquet for our favorite girl,” he announces, dramatically producing a small cluster of yellow wildflowers from seemingly out of thin air, and I can’t help the snort that escapes me.

He hands them over to me with a wink. “And no, we didn’t pick them from a graveyard.”

The absurdity of it all loosens something inside me–just a little.

Then Hunter steps forward, quieter than the others. He doesn’t say anything at first–he just steps

3/4

11:28 Sat, Sep 20

Chapter 150. Layla POV

up beside me, slips a protein bar into my hand, and lets his thumb graze softly across the inside of

my wrist.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify