Page 31 of The Pumpkin Spice Proposal
Mario’s eyes found mine over her head, and something passed between us—a promise, maybe, or just the acknowledgment that this had become something neither of us planned. For a beat, the kitchen felt like the only place in the world that mattered: the warm light, the mess, the imperfect chairs pulled close.
“Hey,” Olivia said suddenly, “the toilet’s making that weird noise again. It sounds like a ghost with digestive issues.”
“That’s very specific,” Mario said.
“I’m a specific person. Can you fix it?”
He looked at me, a question in his eyes. Not about the toilet—about all of it. About staying for toilet repairs and Christmas assembly and reaching high shelves and being here for the chaos and the cookies and the complicated, messy, beautiful life we’d built.
“The toolkit’s under the bathroom sink,” I said softly. The sink was in the tiny hall bathroom, where I kept an emergency roll of tape, a stray hair clip, and a tangle of Christmas lights from last year.
“Come on!” Olivia grabbed his hand, already pulling him toward the hallway. “I’ll tell you my theory about why it only makes the noise during emotional moments. I think our plumbing is psychic.”
As their voices faded down the hall—Olivia chattering about paranormal plumbing, Mario teaching her how to say “wrench” in Italian,chiave—I stood in my destroyed kitchen, surrounded by evidence of our evening. There were flour handprints on the cabinets, sprinkles scattered like confetti, and cookies that looked like they’d been decorated by caffeinated squirrels.
My phone buzzed. June.
Sources report significant bonding over baked goods. Relationship status update?
I looked at the cookie Mario had decorated with Olivia—a pumpkin that somehow looked like a race car—and typed back.
Status: Complicated. Beautiful. Terrifying. Perfect.
June’s response was immediate.
That’s not a Facebook relationship option.
It should be.
I wrote back, then put my phone away and headed down the hall to see if my fake boyfriend and very real daughter needed help with our possibly psychic toilet.
This wasn’t the life I’d planned. It was so much better.
And scarier.
But mostly better.
CHAPTER12
Mario
I should have known betterthan to venture into Thompson’s Hardware on a Saturday morning. In a small town, it was like walking into a lion’s den wearing a meat suit and hoping no one would notice.
“Mario! Just the man I wanted to see!”
June materialized from behind a display of leaf blowers like some kind of suburban ninja. Her hair was extra voluminous today, and she wore a sweater with “Fall in Love” written in glitter across the front. This was June in hunting mode.
“June.” I nodded, already calculating the distance to the electrical tape I’d come for. Fifteen feet. Might as well have been fifteen miles.
“So...” She sidled closer, bringing with her a cloud of perfume that smelled like someone had weaponized a pumpkin spice latte. “Big plans for today?”
“Electrical tape.”
“Oh, Mario.” She laughed, a tinkling sound that set my teeth on edge. “I meant with Lily. Someone saw you leaving her house last night after eleven.”
“We were baking cookies.”
“Is that what they’re calling it now?” She waggled her eyebrows in a way that should have required a permit.
