For parents, time passed like a fleeting breeze, sweeping up the dust of the years. In the blink of an eye, they realized their children were already grown.
Just as Lawrence had predicted, Hayden Lane's clingy phase was incredibly short-lived.
Once he started elementary school, Hayden never asked to sleep in his parents' bed again.
He was a quiet and calm boy, but far from withdrawn. Bonnie and Lawrence often felt a steady, comforting warmth radiating from their son.
If Lawrence was a wild wind, Hayden was an unshakeable mountain. Bonnie sometimes marveled that she and Lawrence had raised a boy with such an even-keeled temperament.
People always said he took after her, but Bonnie didn't think that was entirely true.
In her youth, she had seemed calm, but she had needed a thick layer of ice to protect herself. Beneath the surface, she had been sensitive and fragile, feeling profoundly suffocated during the years when she misunderstood her parents the most.
Though age and experience had brought understanding and forgiveness for the unforgettable pains of her past, allowing her to view people from multiple perspectives, her core personality hadn't changed drastically.
Even now, to anyone outside her close circle of family and friends, Bonnie still gave off an unapproachable, icy vibe.
But Hayden was different. He inherited her quietness, but none of her coldness.
He inherited Bonnie's tolerance and kindness, growing into a gentle boy with a mind of his own. He wasn't fragile, sensitive, lonely, exclusive, stubborn, or rigid.
He simply existed like a steady mountain, like a vast and welcoming ocean.
In many ways, Hayden also took after his father.
He possessed Lawrence's hidden emotional depth and his fiercely optimistic spirit. Though he wasn't as wildly extroverted as Lawrence had been in his youth, he was never a child who shied away from expressing his love.


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