1

      PIPER JAMIESON SAGGED against the sofa cushions and rolled her eyes at the phone receiver. It could have been a wrong number, a pushy telephone solicitor, an obscene caller even, but nooo, it was her mother. Piper loved her mom, but all their conversations boiled down to the same argument—Piper’s love life.

      She started to put her feet up on the oval coffee table, but stopped suddenly, as though her mother could see through the phone line and into her apartment. “So, how’ve you been doing, Mom?”

      “Never mind that. I’m more concerned with how you are,” her mother said. “You don’t feel acute appendicitis coming on, right? You aren’t going to call us tomorrow with a severe case of forty-eight-hour east Brazilian mumps or something?”

      Piper groaned. Although she’d bailed out on all of the family reunions in recent years, she’d used legitimate work-related excuses, never fictional medical ones. But this year she’d made a promise to her grandmother.

      This year, there would be no reprieve.

      “I’ll be there,” she assured her mother. “And I’m looking forward to seeing you all.” Mostly.

      “We’re looking forward to seeing you, too, honey. Especially Nana. When I went to visit her at the hospital last week—”

      “Hospital?” Piper’s chest tightened. She adored her grandmother, even if Nana did stubbornly insist women needed husbands. “Daphne told me she was under the weather, but no one said anything about the hospital.” As Nana advanced in years, Piper couldn’t help worrying over her grandmother’s health.

      A worry her mother was not above exploiting. “You know what would help your Nana? If she knew you had a good man to take care of you.”

      Ah, yes—here came the Good Man Speech. Piper knew it well.

      “You’ve always been independent,” her mother was saying, “but there’s such a thing as being too stubborn. Before you know it, you’ll wake up fifty, without anyone to share your life….”

      Knowing from experience that it did no good to point out she was decades away from turning fifty, Piper stretched across the maroon-and-black-plaid couch. Might as well be comfy while she waited for her mother to wind down.

      Though she’d escaped her small hometown of Rebecca, Texas, and now lived in Houston, Piper couldn’t escape her family’s shared belief that a woman’s purpose in life was to get married. Piper’s sole brush with matrimony had been a broken engagement that still left her with a sense of dazed relief—how had she come so close to spending her life with a man who’d wanted her to be someone different? When her sister, Daphne, had married, Piper thought the pressure would ease, that their mother would be happy to finally have a married daughter. Instead, Mrs. Jamieson was scandalized that her youngest was married, now pregnant, while her oldest didn’t even date.

      As her mom continued to wax ominous about the downfalls of growing old alone, Piper stared vacantly at the dead ficus tree in the corner of her living room. I should water that poor thing. Although, at this point, it was probably more in need of a dirge than H2O.

      “Piper! Are you even listening to me?”

      “Y—mostly.”

      “I asked if that bagel man was still giving you trouble.”

      Mercifully, her mother