Page 3 of Fake it ’Til Fall

My mother uses “spiritual urgency” when someone is sick, engaged, pregnant, divorcing, wearing the wrong shoes to Mass, or refusing to acknowledge a seating chart crisis. It’s a wide net, emotionally speaking. A dragnet, really. One minute you’re living your life, the next you’re wanted in three emotional jurisdictions.

Another text arrives while I’m still staring.

Mom: Darling, please call me when you have a moment. I wanted you to hear this from me.

I know before I know.

Isn’t that rude? The body can be so smug with its little predictions. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait for facts. It just opens the trapdoor and says, Here it comes, idiot. Hope you wore emotional kneepads.

I did not.

Obviously.

The café keeps moving around me. Milk hisses under the espresso wand. Someone laughs near the romance shelves. Rain taps lightly against the front windows, polite as a guest who fully plans to overstay.

I call Soren instead.

He answers on the second ring. “Daisy?”

“Why is she calling me?” I ask, because greeting people is for women whose mothers don’t weaponize concern before dinner.

A pause.

That pause is worse than words. My brother is a man who has negotiated contracts with people who own islands. Silence from him is not casual. Silence from him is paperwork with tabs.

“Are you sitting down?” he asks.

Obviously, I want to say, “Listen, I’m standing beside a pastry case, which is basically the same thing if you’ve accepted baked goods as emotional furniture.”

I don’t.

My family thinks I’m at home after my respectable day job, probably drinking tea and living within my means like a woman in a fancy vitamin commercial. They don’t know I’m in a financial situation so fragile a pharmacy charge could finish me.

I haven’t informed them yet that I’m working extra shifts at a bookstore café and pretending it’s for whimsy. I might never tell them—or anyone—that I’ve considered selling feet pictures on the internet, then rejected the idea only because my left boot currently sounds haunted, and I refuse to enter the adult content market with subpar production values.

“Daisy,” Soren says, softer now. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, never been better.” My voice comes out bright enough to qualify as fraudulent. If emotional fraud were a crime, I’d be doing hard time in a beige jumpsuit.

He exhales.

I can picture him in some glass office, jaw locked, wearing a suit worth more than my grocery budget, already trying to solve a problem I haven’t admitted exists.

“Well, then . . . Liam’s getting married.”

The café slips sideways for half a second.

Not literally. I remain upright because women named Daisy Thorn do not collapse in independent bookstores. We overperform. We smile. We ask people whether they want oat milk while privately reconsidering the last decade of our romantic history and wondering if it’s too late to become someone mysterious who owns linen.

“Oh,” I say.

That’s it.

Oh.

Apparently, language abandons women in their thirties and leaves them with vowel sounds. I can’t wait to see what happens at forty. Maybe I’ll communicate exclusively through blinking and receipts.

“I’m sorry,” Soren says.