Story of My Life

Hazel tasks Cam with leading bingo, and though he is resistant at first, he does a great job with entertaining the senior citizens. When Cam is caught smiling during the day, his siblings tease him and correctly assume that it is Hazel who has made him so happy. After a successful bingo, the day takes another disastrous turn: The pontoon boat—filled with 10 guests on a lake cruise—begins sinking and has to be rescued. The petting zoo animals also break loose, causing chaos, and due to a breaker flip, the ice cream stand product begins melting. Hazel, Cam, and the townspeople scramble to mitigate the disasters, and Cam tells Hazel that he discovered a puncture in the pontoon. He believes that the traitor in Story Lake who is feeding information to Nina has purposefully sabotaged them.

Nina makes an appearance in town to observe the Summer Fest disaster and brags about Dominion’s larger town event, which is happening at the same time. At Nina’s goading, Hazel accuses Nina of sabotaging them. When Nina claims that the town would be better off absorbed by Dominion, Hazel stands up in defense of the town and pushes Nina into the lake. Nina exits and stalks off with ugly parting words. She meets with Emilie—revealed as the town’s snitch—who drives her back to Dominion.

Just as Nina leaves, Jim arrives with Hazel’s mother, Ramona. Ramona reveals that Jim called her, claiming to be worried that Hazel was having a “midlife crisis.” Hazel assures her mother that she isn’t having a crisis; she’s moved to the small town to find the inspiration to write. Zoey reveals to Ramona that Jim is not the innocent savior here but the man who stole Hazel’s first three books and continues to collect their royalties. Ramona becomes angry with Jim after hearing the truth and asks Hazel why she didn’t come to her for help, as her past marriages have left her with considerable accumulated wealth and a team of great, expensive lawyers.

Jim tells Hazel that he came because he believes that she needs guidance. He tells her to give up on this “ridiculous passion project” and go back to writing the next Spring Gate novel she’s contracted to write for the publisher (491). The project is supposed to be a secret, but Jim had lunch with her editor and acquisitions team the day prior to gain the information. Hazel becomes enraged at the boundaries that Jim has crossed and stands up for herself for the first time. She informs Jim that she will write what she wants and will do everything in her power to get people to stop buying the books he owns so that he will no longer receive substantial royalties. At this moment, Goose flies by, drops a fish near Jim, and then chases him back to his car.

After Jim leaves, Hazel has a conversation with her mother in private. Hazel admits that she didn’t want her mother’s help with the divorce, but Ramona claims that she was the person who could most understand and would never have let Jim get ownership of Hazel’s intellectual property. She claims to have read all of Hazel’s novels despite the distance in their relationship. Hazel says that she avoided contact with Ramona because she didn’t want to become anything like her. Ramona reveals that she never liked Jim but “wasn’t about to try to dissuade [Hazel] from [her] own journey” (43). However, she already likes Cam and advises Hazel to go after what she wants relentlessly. When Hazel expresses worry that her relationship with Cam might not work out, her mother wisely states that she doesn’t need to know what will happen in advance; she can keep living and falling in love with what comes next.

Ramona leaves town, and Darius calls a strategy meeting. He informs Hazel that despite the chaos, Summer Fest was a success. Sylvia from the Silver Haven senior citizens home wants to schedule another visit for next month. Throughout September, Bishop Brothers Construction makes progress on Hazel’s home renovations while gaining more business from other clients. More of Cam’s personal items end up at Hazel’s as their relationship progresses, and he begins to stay over every night. Meanwhile, Zoey begins submitting Hazel’s in-progress novel to other publishers in hopes of securing a big deal.

One Friday night, Cam goes out for drinks on the lake with his brothers. They tease Gage about Zoey, whom he mentions a few times in conversation. Their outing is interrupted by a text from their father, who tells Cam that Laura has fallen and is in the hospital. As they go to visit Laura, Cam has flashbacks to the aftermath of Laura’s accident. The unresolved trauma of losing Miller and nearly losing Laura causes Cam to envision Hazel in the hospital bed instead of his sister. Though Laura is completely fine, Cam is strongly reminded of his fear of losing a person he loves and retreats into himself.

Cam returns home and begins drinking. When Hazel visits to check in on him, he breaks up with her without explanation. To push her further away, he accuses her of using the town, the citizens, and their relationship as inspiration for their book instead of truly caring about anyone or anything. Hazel accuses him of unpacking emotional baggage and trauma on her, even if she isn’t quite sure where it’s stemming from, and she leaves his apartment.

Zoey allows Hazel 48 hours to wallow in her misery before she drags her out of bed to finish her novel. Zoey gives Hazel a makeover for a confidence boost before the Bishop brothers arrive to continue construction on Heart House. Zoey tells Hazel that Cam is on another job site for the day.

When Hazel can’t write anything that day, she later admits to Zoey that she has lost her inspiration. Zoey points out that Hazel wrote many novels before Cam. She reminds Hazel that she is the heroine of her own life and that this is the “dark night of the soul” part of her plot (518), where all hope seems to be lost and the protagonist must power through in order to succeed. Hazel gains back her motivation to write after Zoey’s pep talk and decides that she’d like to write at the lodge instead.

Cam attempts to put all his focus into his work, but he is miserable without Hazel. Since their breakup, most of the town sees him as the villain and treats him accordingly. The local news coverage has become full of “excessive adulation” for Hazel (522), with photographs depicting her on various outings with men around town, stoking Cam’s jealousy. The Bishop siblings have also been avoiding Cam lately, and Goose even defecates on Cam’s head.

Cam’s father invites him to the farm, where his parents stage an intervention. They believe that they failed him because Bishops don’t talk about feelings; this has led Cam to deal with his feelings in unhealthy ways, such as hurting Hazel to save himself the pain of potentially losing her one day. When they call Hazel the best thing that’s ever happened to him, Cam denies it and insists that his adoptive parents were the best thing to happen to him. His mother states that he can have more than one good thing in his life, and she encourages him to find as many good things as possible so that when he inevitably loses some, he won’t be left with nothing.

For good measure, Pepper tells Cam that if he had been home at the time of Laura’s accident, he still wouldn’t have been able to prevent the accident from occurring. This allows Cam to let go of that part of his trauma. His mother continues, informing Cam and Francisco that Laura desperately wants to return to the store and grow the business, but they must make it accessible for her by ramp and give her the freedom to run the business.

Cam goes to the gym with his siblings, where they all have an uncomfortable but much-needed conversation about their feelings. Laura confronts Cam about his breakup with Hazel, and Cam admits that it happened because of Laura’s accident. He watched Laura lose everything, and the possibility of going through that himself scares him. Laura convinces him that she didn’t lose everything; she has so much left to love about her life. Laura tells Cam that “the only thing that gets us through the bad times are the people and things we love” (538).

Zoey drags Hazel to the Fish Hook diner on Saturday night. In the past two weeks, Hazel has made progress with her novel; the characters have had the third-act breakup inspired by her real-life breakup, but she has become stuck because she wrote the hero as an “unredeemable dumbass and there [i]s no grand gesture grand enough to warrant forgiveness” (540). Zoey leaves Hazel at the bar top, where a young bodybuilder named Quaid engages her in conversation.

Garland, the town news reporter, photographs Quaid in Hazel’s personal space and posts it on the Neighborly app, giving the town the impression that they’re on a date. As Quaid makes a bold move by rubbing the tension out of Hazel’s shoulders, Cam arrives on the scene and demands that he remove his hands. Cam asks Hazel to talk, but she denies his request.

Later that night, Cam visits Hazel’s house, where he convinces her to let him inside. He admits that he broke up with her because he feared losing another person he loves. Laura and Miller’s accident really scared him, and he has never quite processed this fear. He avoids creating new attachments but has realized that the feeling he gets when he is with Hazel is worth anything “because [they’re] going to have the bad. It’s guaranteed. And the only way to survive it is to hold on to as much of the good as possible” (551). Hazel is hesitant to forgive Cam because he has hurt her greatly. He accepts this and admits that he hasn’t earned her forgiveness, but he plans to do so through a grand romantic gesture.

Hazel arrives home from a successful trip to New York with Zoey, filled with publishing meetings, interviews, and networking. She is surprised to find the renovations completely finished and the home entirely decorated, and she quickly realizes that this is Cam’s grand romantic gesture toward her. The town comes to celebrate both her career success and the renovation completion. Sylvia, the woman who escorted the senior citizens to town during Summer Fest, attends and reveals that she is the vice president of land acquisitions. She bought out the town’s old hospital to transform it into a care center for the senior citizens, helping with the town’s financial burden. Darius explains that Nina railroaded the county commissioners into moving up the deadline for the sewage treatment plan. They have now pushed the deadline back, giving the town five more years to come up with the money.

Cam eventually arrives, gives a romantic speech in which he declares his love for Hazel and promises to never run away from those feelings again, and presents her with more gifts. He reveals that he traveled to New York with his brothers and Ramona’s expensive lawyers, where they practically blackmailed Jim into signing the rights to Hazel’s books back to her. Cam also gifts Hazel two pet cats. Hazel accepts his grand declaration and professes her own love. She notes that Cam has also crafted a special writing desk for her, inscribed with the phrase “Happily Ever After Starts Here” (567). Hazel jokes that Cam has presented her with the grandest romantic gesture of any hero she’s ever written.

Thirteen months later, Hazel is married to Cam and now stands onstage at the Second Annual Fall Fest to accept the first-ever Hazel G. Hart Community Service Award. Cam and his brothers have gotten a pontoon boat that they named The HEA (The Happily Ever After) with an accessibility ramp for Laura. They have completed their application to become foster parents, and Hazel is pregnant but hasn’t yet shared the happy news with Cam. The town enjoys heavy tourist traffic, including several of Hazel’s readers, who are happy to vacation all year round in the town she fell in love with.