YaoIn
ABOUT ME
ABOUT ME
STORY BY YaoIn
Don't Bully the Quiet Office Worker
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I had spent three months falling for a man who had never seen my left arm. I was born without a left hand, and although I wore a practical prosthesis at work, I had learned how quickly a first impression could shrink a whole person down to one visible difference. Online, I could choose the moment someone learned about it. Theo was affectionate, funny, and so clingy that he sent me good-morning messages before my alarm and sulked when I forgot to say good night. When a launch at my small software company went wrong, my manager blamed me in front of the entire team—and Theo was the only person who knew how frightened I was. I had to decide whether to keep hiding behind a screen or risk letting the person I loved see all of me.
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A Midwestern Woman Marries Into Old Money, and I Lead Them All Astray
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The first time my new in-laws asked me to help close their neighborhood pantry, I was standing in its kitchen with a tray of untouched salmon in my hands. The Weller Foundation planned to announce that the pantry would move before construction began on the family's waterfront hotel. The people who depended on it had heard no such thing. I had spent years managing a food co-op in Iowa, and I knew the difference between a promise and a place you could actually open your doors. My husband wanted me to trust his family. His mother wanted me to sign off on a polished statement. I wanted the people in line to eat, and I wanted to know what would happen when the building was gone. I thought I was marrying into a family with unusual manners. I hadn't understood how much of their lives depended on nobody asking an ordinary question out loud.
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Don't Step Aside, This Photo Needs You In It
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My sister asked me not to step out of the family portrait at the same moment our father announced he had already sold the hotel our mother built. I had come to Bellwether Cove for June's wedding, not to vote on the future of Vale House, but Dad needed my face beside his for the buyer's press release—and my signature on a proxy he claimed I had sent months ago. My mother left me enough voting shares to stop the sale, along with a lifetime of reasons to avoid using them. June wanted the money, Dad wanted the deal, and I wanted the truth about what they had done in my name. When the last family photograph was finally taken, the question wasn't whether I belonged in it. It was whether June and I could still stand together once I stopped helping our father pretend we were one happy family.
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The Buyout Went to My Brother, but Mom's Care Came to Me
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The day my mother signed the coastal buyout papers, she handed my brother a check for $412,000 and asked me to move into her rental so I could manage her recovery. I had already spent six months driving her to appointments, organizing her medications, and sleeping beside her after a fall. When I asked what she had set aside for my time, she looked at me as if I had asked to be paid for loving her. My brother called the money a fresh start. I called it the price of the house I grew up in. The harder question was what my mother believed my life was worth now that hers depended on it.
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After I Woke Inside a Blended Family
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The first time my stepson shoved the new boy into the mud, I was standing on the terrace with a cup of coffee and a warning glowing across my vision: Treat both children fairly, or the heir will remember what you allowed. I had been awake in this body for less than an hour. I knew the boy called Owen was secretly Prince Rowan of Bellacourt, and I knew the novel's version of me had failed him. When Rowan reclaimed his place, he destroyed my stepson's future and left me with the blame. I could not control a prince, a grieving teenager, or the strange rules that had dropped me into this house. I could choose what I did next. But would protecting Rowan mean betraying the boy I had promised to love as my own?
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The Clingy Girl's Big Win
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When I fell for Adrian, I worried that my messages came too fast, my questions came too often, and my affection took up more room than he wanted to give it. So I offered him one day every week when he wouldn't have to answer me at all. No texts, no calls, no explanations. He accepted with a relief I tried not to notice. At first, I told myself that making space for him was proof I could love someone without crowding him. Then I learned he'd been in my city and let me believe he was hundreds of miles away. I had to decide whether I could keep shrinking my needs to preserve a relationship that existed mostly on a screen, or whether loving him meant asking for something real.
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In Year Ten of Saving the Troubled Heir, I Married His Brother
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On the night we announced our wedding, I watched my fiancé give his new assistant the necklace he had chosen for me. Caleb called it a misunderstanding. His brother Grant called it a pattern. For ten years, I had believed my love could help Caleb become someone who would never hurt me. I had helped him build a company, a future, and a life far from the boy I first met. Now he wanted me to sign away the work that had made that life possible, while insisting the woman at his side meant nothing. I could walk away from the man I had spent a decade saving. But could I trust the brother who had seen every failure and never once asked me to save him?
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Still Friends
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At dinner, Eli Mercer peeled a bowl of stone crab claws for me, and his mother watched my face as if the answer to a question she'd been asking for six months had just landed on the table. Then she smiled and said, "I knew you two wouldn't stay apart." I had come to the Mercer house because I'd promised to be polite, not because Eli and I had gotten back together. We had broken up in spring. I was leaving Saltmere in three weeks for a restoration job two states north. But Eli's hands still knew how to crack a claw without spilling a drop of juice, and mine still reached for the bowl before I remembered what we were supposed to be now. I wanted to believe that old tenderness meant something. I also wanted to know whether Eli could love me without assuming I would always arrange my life around his.
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That Star Doesn't Carry My Name
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At the Halcyon Point Observatory, I found the signal that could change my career. Three weeks later, at a packed public unveiling, I watched my fiancé accept the credit while a silver star glowed above the stage with his name beneath it. The discovery was real, the applause was loud, and the raw data still sat on a server I had protected from the moment I saw the first suspicious dip. Owen said the credit was a harmless naming choice, a temporary label for a candidate planet orbiting a distant star. I knew what it cost me to challenge him: my fellowship, our wedding, and the future I had spent years building beside him. But the question I couldn't avoid was whether I could still trust the man who had asked me to share my life with him.
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After I Told My Brother I Wouldn't Need His Scent
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The morning I told my brother I would stop relying on his scent, my next heat was already twelve days away. For years, his calm, familiar Alpha pheromones had been the only thing that could settle the panic and fever that came with it. I knew the arrangement was unusual. I also knew Eli had put his own plans on hold more than once because I was afraid to ask anyone else for help. So I made a promise I meant to keep: I would find another way. Then a new Alpha joined the small community clinic where I worked, and her presence made my carefully managed world feel impossible to control. I could accept help without making it a debt. But could I trust myself to want someone when I no longer needed her?
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