Page 109 of Fake it ’Til Fall

“Where’d you get that nickname?”

“Winnifred.” A pause. “She has a dossier. There are tabs.”

“Of course she does.”

“She also ranked your emotional availability by era.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“You peaked in the dog adoption chapter.”

“Sounds right.”

“Is it weird?” she asks.

“No.”

It isn’t.

That’s the weird part.

“It’s fine,” I add.

“Okay.” She says it again, softer this time, “Wolfe.”

Something in me goes still.

Not calm.

Listening.

“We’re going to be fine,” she says. “My mother is going to love you, which will be its own special hell, and the town is going to lose its mind, and we’re going to carry crates and smile and answer invasive questions with the emotional range of two people who definitely make healthy choices. This evening, we’ll be back on this road going the other way. It’s a day. We’ll be fine if it’s just a day.”

She means it to reassure me.

It doesn’t.

This might be the first day, but then there’s the next visit. The community dinner. The job interview. The practice. Maybe even the wedding where her ex gets married and half the town pretends not to watch her breathe.

Finally, the end of fall.

Then the part where the lie expires because Daisy goes back to Boston and I plan to move here next year. Assuming Winterberry decides I’m safe enough to teach teenagers how not to turn anger into a personality.

A qualification I am not sure I’ve earned, considering anger has paid rent in my body for years and refuses to leave a forwarding address.

We come around the last bend, and the vineyard opens below us.

Rows and rows of it sweep down the hill toward the water, green fading into gold, mist caught low between the vines. The first sun touches the tops of the trees, turning the edges copper. There are pumpkins stacked near the tasting room steps, not the grocery-store kind, but the pretty heirloom ones Daisy likes. Pale orange, cream, sage green, a few with ridges deep enough to look dramatic on purpose.

Of course the pumpkins have better emotional range than I do.

Barrels of mums flank the gravel drive. A hand-painted sign near the entrance reads, HARVEST TASTINGS BEGIN AT NOON.

It looks like fall designed itself for people with disposable income and unresolved family issues.

A single light burns in the big house.

Which means someone in the Thorn house is already awake.