“You can’t.”
“Sure she can,” Julia jumped in to say. “Dates aren’t required.”
“If they are, I call Cameron,’ Eliana said.
“Cameron is going with Shayla,” their mom said absently as she set up her sewing machine.
“You have a date? Go Cam!” Eliana and Julia high-fived him.
Winnie was happy for him, too, but she needed to stay focused. “That does mean you’ll be the only person without a date.”
Eliana snorted. “Way to make me sound pathetic, Grandma.”
“It’s not pathetic dear. Just lonely.” Her heart pinged with her own loneliness, but she soldiered on. “And think of all the questions you’ll get.”
“Everyone knows she has her Happily Single platform,” Julia said around a mouthful of cookie.Not helpful, Julia.
“And I’m not interested in dating.”
“Exactly. And everyone is going to be trying to set you up all night. It’ll be exhausting,” Grandma Winnie continued.
“Who would do that, Mom?” Lisa said. “Our family doesn’t have big matchmaker energy.”
Et tu, Brute?
Winnie carried on despite her family’s less than helpful comments. “Perhaps you could convince a young man to be your fake date for the wedding, just to avoid questions.” She’d read that story trope in an Allegra Winters book recently, and the main characters had fallen madly in love. “But who could you ask? Oh, I know! Asher. He’d do it.”
Eliana, Julia, and Lisa looked at her like she was nuts before all three broke into peals of laughter. Winnie felt indignant at first—fake dating was a great idea—but their laughter caught on, especially when Julia choked on the cookie she was eating and started yelling out she couldn’t breathe, while clearly breathing.
“Oh, Mom, I thought you were serious for a minute there,” Lisa said, between wheezing laughter. “Fake dating. You’re hilarious.”
“Fake dating is just about the only dating I’d agree to,” Eliana quipped before dropping into giggles again. “Let me run it by Asher.”
“Please, please ask him,” Julia said, her hands in the prayer position. “Let us know what he says.”
“It doesn’t work if everyone knows it’s fake,” Winnie grumbled, wiping away her own tears of mirth. The doorbell rang, and Winnie went to answer it while everyone worked out who else Eliana could ask to be her fake date to the wedding.
So that idea had bombed, but that didn’t mean she’d given up. If the secret seven could be deterred by one bad idea, or one scheme gone wrong, they’d have given up a long time ago.
She opened the door distractedly, still half-listening to the conversation when her eyes landed on the tall, handsome gentleman standing in the doorway. He wore light gray slacks, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and was holding a small bouquet of colorful daisies.
Her favorite. He remembered.
“Hi, Winnie.” His voice sucked her back in time nearly sixty years, and it was like no time had passed at all.
“Gerard,” she breathed. Oh, no. No, no, no.
It couldn’t be.
Gerard Hammond was her first husband. The one no one,not even Horace, knew about.
She pushed him against the chest—his very muscular chest—and out the door before her daughter and grandkids could see him.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed, feeling more flustered than she had in a long time. She ran a hand over her hair, hair that hadn’t seen the inside of a salon in almost six weeks. She probably had roots for days.
What was she doing? She brought her hand down to her side and straightened her shoulders. She wouldnotfeel self-conscious in front of Gerard.
He held out his phone, and she saw Wedded Bliss, the social media page the secret seven had started. He’d pulled up the viral post of her and Horace. “I’m here to see you.”
