NOT a Valentine Story

Prologue

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Honesty is the best policy, I always say.

Mirabelle

Five years ago

Where do you see yourself in five years?

It’s a classic interview question. One that many people anticipate and prepare for. One that assesses ambition and, for large corporations, potential loyalty.

Unfortunately, I’ve been crippled my whole life with a violent sense of justice and a dreadful compulsion for honesty.

So I have always answered this stupid question with the stupid truth.

Where do I want to be in five years?

At home.

With a loving husband.

And a few children.

I want to be a homemaker and a housewife who spends her free time on hobbies and crafts and book clubs.

…I do not want to be a corporate slave…or taking care of grown men as though they are my children.

Unfortunately, again, the only place my honest answer to that stupid question worked out was at Maid for You, the local housekeeping service in sweet small town Amarella, Georgia, located just along the Blue Ridge Mountains, where tourism is rampant and AirBNBs need lots and lots of cleaning after horrific weekend parties.

I’ve been stuck here, sent to disgusting house after disgusting house to make ends meet, ever since my summer after high school when I was job searching as a means to get me from high school graduate to happily married housewife.

Despite the raging tourism I find myself surrounded by in this position, I’ve yet to meet anyone worth starting a family with, much less moving away for.

So, here I stay, in this dead-end job, pining after losers who break my heart and going to book clubs with elderly women who try to get me to read their Hallmark holiday romcoms year-round…or their salacious monster smuts just once…and there is no in between.

This is my life.

The life of poor twenty-year-old Mirabelle Peters.

And, to be perfectly honest, I’m not happy with it.