Your mother is crying about grandchildren. Fix this.
A follow-up came seconds later, as if he couldn’t help himself.
Marriage is for after the podium. Don’t waste time. Get back to racing.
Then June.
The Facebook group needs to know your ring size. For reasons.
“I need air,” Lily said.
“I need a drink,” I said.
“I need a snack,” Olivia added. “Making jewelry is exhausting.”
Ben laughed so hard he snorted. Traitor. “Welcome to small-town life. Where your business is everyone’s business, and resistance is futile.”
The pipe cleaner ring sat in my palm, already shedding glitter onto my jeans. Olivia beamed up at me with complete faith that I would treasure her creation. Mrs. Sage was flipping through bridal magazines with poorly concealed glee. Lily looked like she wanted to crawl under the counter and hide until spring.
And somehow, despite the chaos and the gossip and the two hundred people apparently planning our proposal, all I could think about was how Lily’s hair caught the light from the window, and how Olivia’s smile was exactly like her mother’s, and how this ridiculous, invasive, overwhelming place had started to feel like home.
I carefully tucked the pipe cleaner ring into my pocket.
“For safekeeping,” I told Olivia, who squealed and hugged me around the waist.
Lily’s eyes met mine over her daughter’s head, and something passed between us—panic, definitely, but also something softer. A recognition that we were in this together, whatever “this” was.
“The Harvest Gala’s next week,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“They’re all expecting...”
“I know.”
“What do we do?”
I looked at the pipe cleaner ring already coating my pocket with glitter, at Olivia still attached to my waist, at Mrs. Sage “subtly” showing Ben a magazine page featuring winter weddings, at the text from my mother now asking about baptism preferences for future grandchildren.
“We get through the gala,” I said. “Together. Everything else... We’ll figure it out.”
“That’s not much of a plan.”
“Do you have a better one?”
She laughed, but it was shaky. “Apparently June’s Facebook group has several.”
“With color-coded spreadsheets,” Olivia added helpfully. “And a Pinterest board. It’s very thorough.”
I pulled out my phone to find seventeen new notifications from various townspeople offering proposal assistance, venue suggestions, and someone named Roger volunteering his brother’s mariachi band.
“We don’t need a mariachi band,” I said to no one in particular.
“Obviously,” Mrs. Sage said, not looking up from her magazine. “This is a fall wedding. Acoustic guitar or string quartet only.”
“There’s no wedding!” Lily and I protested together.
But even as we said it, I could feel that pipe cleaner ring in my pocket, ridiculous and perfect and impossibly right, and I wondered if maybe the town knew something we didn’t.
