We haven’t agreed yet on what comes next after the cookout if we can’t. I think we should still try my mom and Grandma tomorrow. He’s been less committed.
“You look like you’re about to throw up,” he says.
“It’s how I prep for all of my roles.”
He slides me another look. One side of his mouth hitches up. “Uh-huh.”
I shouldn’t trust him this much, but Lorelei has always said he’s the best man she knows, and I adore Lorelei, so we’re doing this.
If I have other options, I can’t think of what they might be.
We’re both putting a lot on the line here. We could both completely lose our families over this. There was something in the set of his jaw and the faraway, haunted look in his eyes while he was pacing Lorelei’s living room that made me suspect this is about something bigger to him.
But I still put him in this position, so I feel like I owe it to him to be honest. “Do you ever feel like your family loves you, but not enough to trust you to do what’s best for yourself, even when you’re nearly thirty years old, and you start to resent it, but then you do something immensely stupid and realize that you might completely lose them over it, but also, you’re mad that they’ve put you in this position in the first place and you’re trying not to be mad because you know they’re doing what they think is best, but it’s just ... complicated?”
His entire body lifts with the size of the breath that he inhales, and his cheeks puff as he blows it out. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
My heart squeezes. “That part makes me a little sick to my stomach,” I whisper.
I love my grandma. I love my mom. I want both of them to be able to retire and enjoy their time outside of the bakery, even if Mom’s retirement is still several years away.
But that’s the point of Grandma announcing me as her successor. To have someone in the wings for whenever Mom’s ready to step aside, too, which will likely be sooner rather than later.
And me belonging in New York aside, I’m not the right person to run it.
I would rather that they think I’ve betrayed them by loving the wrong person than tell them the truth that living here and running the gingerbread bakery would make me miserable, and I’d ultimately destroy it.
Not because I’d want to destroy it. I love the Gingerbread House. I have so many good memories from the kitchen. Helping little kids put together their own gingerbread houses that actually taste good. Helping Mom and Grandma swap out the nutcracker decorations with the seasons. Riding the float in the Christmas parade and tossing out miniature gingerbread cookies to all the kids along the route.
But I can love the Gingerbread House and also know that running it is not what I’m supposed to do with my life. It’s like loving the tree at Rockefeller Center and knowing you’re not supposed to have one of your own in your dinky apartment. Or like adoring a Monet at the Met and knowing that it, too, doesn’t belong in your apartment.
There are things you embrace in your everyday life, and things that are better left for short visits.
Tinsel is for short visits.
New York is where my heart and my life and my creativity are.
“At least you know how to act,” Dane says. “I’ll be the weak link here.”
“Do you believe that us faking this engagement to end a feud is a good thing to do?”
“Yes.”
“Just feel that, and you’ll do great.”
I hope.
I don’t know his story or what his family expects of him. Actually, I don’t know much about him at all. We quickly covered that he moved to San Francisco after college to work at an engineering firm that manages automated assembly lines for various manufacturing companies around the world. He has an adorable if lazy dog who’s chilling in the back seat. And he wants to end our families’ feud badly enough that he’s willing to pretend to be engaged to me to do it.
“How can a guy go wrong when his fiancée believes in him?” he deadpans.
For the first time in what feels like centuries, I actually laugh.
He slides me another look. “I won the school spelling bee when I was in fourth grade.”
I would’ve been in third. Was I there? “You’re very smart.”
“My dad had everyone over to celebrate, and the first thing both my uncle and my grandpa said wasThose Andersons have never had a kid win a spelling bee. Take that, idiots.”
