4. Mario
Mario
I was dragged back to the Sage house for dinner under protest. My protest was silent, of course, a stony refusal to engage that Ben completely ignored.
He drove, I stared out the window at the blur of aggressively quaint houses, and the silence in the car was a standoff.
He was pretending everything was normal.
I was pretending I hadn’t just had my anonymity detonated by a woman named June and a weaponized pumpkin patch.
The fury that had propelled me away from the festival grounds had cooled into something heavier and more familiar: the cold, hard certainty that I had made a catastrophic error in judgment.
Coming here was a mistake. Trusting Ben’s assessment that this town was a backwater where I could disappear was the mistake.
Existing in the same postal code as his chaotic, camera-happy sister was definitely a mistake.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to get in my car, drive back to the airport, and get on the first flight to anywhere that didn’t smell of dead leaves and treachery.
Anywhere but here. But my car was still in a shipping container somewhere in the Atlantic.
My ribs still ached with a dull, thrumming beat.
And my face, when I’d caught a glimpse of it in the bathroom mirror before dinner, still looked like I’d lost a fight with a bag of plums. I was stuck.
A prisoner of good intentions and pot roast.
The moment we walked through the door, the scent hit me—rich, savory, the unmistakable aroma of a slow-cooked meal. It was the smell of home, of family, of everything I systematically avoided. To me, it smelled like a trap.
Margaret was beaming, wiping her hands on her apron. “There you are! Just in time. Mario, dear, I hope you’re hungry.”
Ben clapped me on the shoulder. “He’s always hungry.”
I was a bug under a microscope. A specimen labeled ‘Ben’s Poor, Tragic Friend.’ Every warm smile, every offer of food, felt like a tightening of a net I hadn’t even seen being cast.
Dinner was, impossibly, worse than the pumpkin patch.
At least there, I could maintain a physical distance.
Here, I was seated at the long dining table, wedged between a talkative uncle who wanted to discuss torque and Ben, who kept nudging me with his foot every time my expression settled into its natural state of grim forbearance.
And Lily. She was seated directly across from me, next to Olivia.
She looked as miserable as I felt. Her face was pale, her movements small and tight.
She spent most of her time meticulously cutting Olivia’s pot roast into microscopic, identical cubes, her eyes fixed on the task as if it were a complex bomb-defusing operation.
She refused to look at me. It was the only thing we had in common right now.
The conversation buzzed around us, a general hum of family news and town chatter. For about ten minutes, I thought I might get away with it. I could just be a piece of furniture that occasionally ate mashed potatoes.
Then Margaret cleared her throat. It was a small sound, but it cut through the din like a starter pistol. The table fell silent. The ambush was about to begin.
“June stopped by this afternoon,” she said, her gaze moving from Lily to me and back again, a slow, deliberate volley. “She showed me the most darling picture.”
Lily froze, her fork halfway to her mouth. A faint pink stained her cheeks.
“From the festival grounds,” Margaret continued, her voice buttery smooth. “Of the two of you. It was so … candid.”
Across the table, Lily’s knuckles were white where she gripped her fork. She looked like she was seconds away from bolting. I knew the feeling.
“Looked like quite the tumble, Lil,” Ben said, leaning back in his chair with a grin. He was enjoying this. I made a mental note to sabotage his car’s ignition system later.
“It was nothing,” Lily said, her voice tight. “I tripped over a pumpkin. Mario was just standing there.”
“Standing there and catching you like a real Prince Charming,” Aunt Carol supplied with a dreamy sigh.
I felt my jaw clench. Every muscle in my body was coiled tight, ready to flee.
This was what I’d been running from—the casual dissections of my life, the expectations, the narratives spun by people who knew nothing about me.
For years, it had been the press. Now, it was this cozy, suffocating circle of well-meaning suburbanites.
“Well, whatever it was,” Margaret said, her eyes pinning me to my chair, “it’s certainly got the town talking.
It’s just so lovely to see Lily with someone.
Someone strong. Someone who can, you know, look out for her.
” She gave me a smile that was both beatific and deeply terrifying. “What are your intentions, Mario?”
Intentions.
Le mie intenzioni? The word dropped onto the table like a grenade.
My intentions? My intentions were to heal, to disappear, to figure out who the hell I was if I wasn’t the man behind the wheel of a multi-million-dollar machine. Madonna.
My intentions were to not be here, at this table, being interrogated about a woman I barely knew who seemed to be a walking, talking agent of chaos.
I could feel the weight of a dozen pairs of eyes on me. Say the wrong thing, and it would be all over town before the apple pie was served. Say the right thing—not that I had any idea what that was—and it would be even worse.
I opened my mouth, a sterile, noncommittal phrase forming in my head. Something about being friends. Something about Ben. But before I could speak, Ben scraped his chair back.
“You know what? I need to borrow these two for a second. Important festival business.” He jerked his head toward the hallway. “Top secret. Involves… hay bale logistics.”
He grabbed my arm with one hand and Lily’s with the other, hauling us both out of our chairs before anyone could object. Margaret looked momentarily disappointed, her interrogation cut short, but she acquiesced. Town festival business was, after all, serious business.
Ben frog-marched us out of the dining room, down the hall, and through the kitchen, not stopping until we were outside on the small, enclosed back porch.
He shut the glass door behind us, plunging the small space into relative quiet.
The only light came from the kitchen window, casting long, distorted shadows around us.
The air was cold, smelling of potted geraniums and impending rain.
Lily immediately wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her elbows as if she were freezing. She still wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at a crack in the floorboards.
I leaned against the wall, crossing my arms. My entire body felt like a clenched fist. “Hay bale logistics?” I asked, my voice dripping with sarcasm.
“You’re welcome,” Ben said, ignoring my tone. He turned to his sister. “Are you okay?”
Lily finally looked up, her eyes wide and glassy in the dim light. “Okay? Ben, the entire town thinks I’m throwing myself at him! June is probably already Photoshopping our wedding photos. Mom asked about his intentions . This is a nightmare.”
“And I’m a celebrity again,” I cut in, my voice hard. “Which is the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be. Your sister and her runaway vegetables have compromised my entire reason for being here.”
“Okay, first of all, it was a gourd,” she snapped, her head whipping around to glare at me. “And I didn’t ask you to catch me!”
“You’re right. Next time, I’ll let you taste the dirt.”
“Maybe you should!”
“Enough!” Ben held up his hands, stepping between us like a referee. “Both of you, stop. You’re both miserable. I get it. The town’s talking, Mom’s plotting. It’s a mess.” He took a deep breath. “But I have an idea. A way to fix this for both of you.”
I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like the look on his face. It was the same look he’d had in college right before he convinced me that street-racing a pizza delivery scooter was a sound investment of our time.
“What idea?” Lily asked, her voice wary.
Ben looked from me to her, a slow, calculating smile spreading across his face. “You should pretend to date.”
The silence on the porch was absolute. The chirping of crickets outside seemed to stutter to a halt. I just stared at him. He couldn’t be serious. Of all the insane, hare-brained, monumentally stupid things I had ever heard, this was a podium finisher.
Lily found her voice first. It was a choked, incredulous squeak. “What?”
“Are you out of your mind?” I said, my voice dangerously low. “Pretend to date her? The entire point is for me to be invisible. How is publicly attaching myself to the town’s resident flower-pusher going to accomplish that?”
“Hey!” Lily bristled.
“Think about it,” Ben said, his voice dropping into a persuasive, reasonable tone.
“Strategically. Right now, you’re a mystery, Mario.
You’re the big-shot F1 Italian racecar driver back from a crash, hiding out in Autumn Grove.
That’s interesting. The press loves interesting.
Tabloids, sports blogs—they eat that stuff up.
And Lily, you’re the perpetually single mom everyone’s trying to set up. That’s a project. Mom will never stop.”
He paused, letting his words sink in. He had a point, and I hated him for it.
“But,” he continued, pointing a finger between us, “if you’re dating …
what does that story become? Famous driver leaves the fast lane behind for a quiet life.
He falls for his best friend’s sister, a sweet single mom in a small town.
” He spread his hands. “It’s boring. It’s a cliché.
It’s a Hallmark movie. And you know what the press does with a boring story?
They leave it alone. There’s no angle, no drama.
You’re not a mystery anymore, Mario. You’re just a guy with a girlfriend. You could hide in plain sight.”