Page 101 of Fake it ’Til Fall

I close my eyes.

Bea pats my shoulder with the solemn comfort of a woman enjoying herself.

“Not a theme,” I warn Winnifred.

“Trust me on this,” she says. “It’s going to be amazing.”

“That is exactly what people say before they ruin someone’s bangs, wedding, or emotional stability.”

“Good news,” Winnifred says. “You already have unstable covered.”

“I understand optics, but don’t overdo this.”

“I promise, it’ll be painless.”

Chapter Thirteen

Daisy

By Sunday morning, I have learned that “painless” is the most dangerous word in the English language.

It ranks above “quick favor,” above “low-key family thing,” above even “we should talk,” which is the three-word phrase that ended my engagement and several of my better cardigans.

Painless is what people say right before they reach for the wax strip.

I know this because Winnifred has called me three times since yesterday, each call more cheerful than the last, each one carrying a new idea she describes as “organic,” which is a word that has lost all meaning to me.

“Organic” used to mean produce.

Now, it means my sister-in-law wants to stage a candid photo of me looking windswept and romantically fulfilled outside her bakery which, sadly, I haven’t visited since it opened.

“It can’t look staged,” she said earlier this morning, at an hour no woman, pregnant or otherwise, should be awake. “That’s the whole point. It has to look like someone caught you living your beautiful, private, deeply in-love life.”

“I don’t have a beautiful, private, deeply in-love life. I have two jobs and a dog that isn’t mine.”

“That’s why we’re manufacturing one. Keep up.”

So now it’s a few hours before noon on Sunday, and I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor of my apartment with a mug of coffee going cold beside me, a notebook open on my knee, and a growing certainty that I have made a terrible mistake involving a man, his agent, his mother, an entire township, and a dog with the moral compass of a drunk raccoon.

The notebook says, at the top, in my own handwriting:

THE ROLLOUT. DO NOT PANIC.

I have underlined DO NOT PANIC twice, which is, I’m aware, a form of panic.

Beneath it, in Bea’s handwriting, because she stole the pen yesterday like a woman seizing a weapon:

Underline less.

I’m choosing to ignore that.

My phone buzzes against the floorboards.

Forrest: Your sister-in-law called me.

I stare at it.

Daisy: You mean your cousin?