Apparently, We're Engaged: A Fake Engagement Romance
She had ninety minutes. She got a fianc .
Kate Hollister drove out to that farmhouse to hand an eighty-eight-year-old woman a finished photo album and be home by seven.
Instead she got introduced to forty people as Thomas Riley's fianc e.
She had two seconds to fix it. Two seconds, one open mouth, and Evelyn Riley in the doorway with her whole face saying please.
Kate closed her mouth. That is how it started.
He was not consulted.
Thomas inspects bridges for the state of Michigan. Fifty-two years old, six words where anybody else would use twelve, and the last thing he needed was to walk into his mother's kitchen and find a stranger already wearing his family's expectations.
So they write eleven rules on a napkin that night. Ten weeks. A hard end date. Nothing real.
Then the house fills up.
Thirty-some relatives. Every bed spoken for. Which is how a woman who plans her life in fifteen-minute blocks ends up in the boathouse with the flannel sheets, the good pillows, one bed, and a man who has already worked out that she will drink her coffee cold rather than ask anybody for anything.
The guest list climbs to a hundred and forty-seven. There is a wedding planner. There is an arch. There is an aunt informing the entire county that Kate is Presbyterian, and Kate, who has corrected the record for a living for twenty years, standing in a corner and letting it go.
And somewhere in Thomas's files there is a photograph Kate mailed him back in February, months before any of this, that he has taken out and looked at more than once.
He fell first. He has no intention of mentioning it.
Ten weeks. One napkin. And a date in September that Evelyn will not say out loud.
Because Evelyn planned every bit of this. She picked Kate on purpose, for a reason she has never spoken to a living soul, and she is running out of time to watch it work.
APPARENTLY, WE'RE ENGAGED is a laugh-out-loud, slow-burn, later-in-life romantic comedy set in northern Michigan, where the casseroles get counted, the family is undefeated, and the fake relationship turns out to be the most honest thing either of them has ever done.
Fake engagement. Forced proximity. Only one bed. A matchmaking grandmother with an agenda and a deadline. Small-town summer, screen doors, and a pig in the ground by six. He falls first and he falls hard. Found family, loud and entirely uninvited. Slow burn, real heat, and a happily ever after you will feel like you helped build.
For readers who believe the best love stories happen to people old enough to know exactly what they are risking.
She was going to be home by seven.
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