Page 115 of Fake it ’Til Fall

“Eat breakfast,” she says. “We have a busy day, and I’d like everyone conscious for it.”

“I love when family affection sounds like a staff memo,” I say, reaching for a donut.

“You faint once during harvest inventory and no one lets you forget it,” Helena says.

“I was seventeen and dehydrated from excellence.”

“You were seventeen and refusing water because you thought carrying four crates at once made you indispensable.”

I take a bite of donut instead of responding, which is mature and also delicious.

Forrest watches me for half a second too long.

“What?” I ask around cinnamon and poor life choices.

“Nothing.”

“That was not a nothing face.”

“You have sugar on your mouth.”

I freeze.

Mom freezes.

Helena freezes with the predatory delight of a woman handed entertainment before breakfast.

Forrest reaches for a napkin, then stops himself.

Small.

Barely anything.

Still, I feel the almost-touch in every place it doesn’t happen.

I grab the napkin from him before my mother can start embroidering our initials onto guest towels.

“Thank you,” I say, wiping my mouth with the dignity of a woman who has not just been emotionally compromised by pastry dust.

Forrest looks away first.

Good.

Terrible.

Breakfast becomes a brief, dangerous exercise in not letting my mother’s hope sit too comfortably in the room. She asks Forrest about Puck. Helena asks him if he knows anything about fixing a broken cooler in the flower shed. Forrest says, “Probably,” which, from him, is basically a sonnet.

Mom notices that too.

Of course she does.

By the time we step outside, the morning has warmed just enough to lift the mist off the vineyard. Rows of vines stretch down the hill toward the lake, leaves rustling in the light wind. The air smells like damp earth, grapes, and woodsmoke from somewhere beyond the barns.

My chest aches before I can stop it.

I missed this.

That’s the awful part.