My Neighbor Begged Me To Be Her Fake Husband For A Weekend — She Had No Idea I Needed Saving Too

Part 2

I looked right at Heather and told her I wasn’t sensible about it at all.

I kept my hand firmly over Megan’s under the table.

I explained that I had lost my beloved wife three years ago.

I had decided I was entirely done and that I had experienced my one good thing in life.

I baked my bread and kept entirely to myself.

I was very careful never to want anything ever again.

I held Heather’s sharp gaze across the table.

Then I told her how a woman I barely knew let her little boy follow me around a bakery.

She showed up every single day exhausted from working a double shift.

She still asked her kid about his day before she asked about anything else.

I watched her do that for months before I ever got the nerve to ask her to coffee.

I told the silent table that I took the long way to the most obvious decision of my life.

The porch went completely quiet.

Heather’s critical smile faltered into something highly uncertain.

Tyler piped up without looking up from his dinner plate.

He proudly announced that I made the best cookies in the whole world.

The intense tension broke and Megan’s father laughed loudly.

The dinner moved on to safer topics.

Megan’s hand stayed securely under mine the whole meal.

Once, when no one was looking, she squeezed my fingers tightly.

I was almost sure it wasn’t for the story.

The weekend went better than either of us had any right to expect.

I held Megan’s hand when the family was watching and let go when they weren’t.

We told our rehearsed story and it held together perfectly.

Sitting next to her didn’t feel like a performance anymore.

It felt like the startling start of something I hadn’t dared to want.

But Sarah was always watching us closely.

She cornered me on the dark porch the second evening.

She held a glass of expensive wine with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

Sarah called her sister impulsive and labeled her a walking disaster.

She warned me that her sister was a tremendous amount of work.

Something finally snapped inside me on that porch.

I asked Sarah if I could tell her exactly what I saw.

I described a woman who raised a kind and incredibly brave little boy completely on her own.

She worked on her feet all day and never once made it their problem.

I told Sarah you don’t pity strong people like Megan.

You stand up respectfully when they walk in the room.

Sarah’s smug smile vanished completely.

She turned and walked quickly back inside the house.

I walked down to the dock to cool off in the dark.

Megan found me a few minutes later.

She sat down close beside me on the wooden planks.

She whispered that I wasn’t supposed to mean what I said on the porch.

I looked at her face illuminated by the moonlight.

I told her someone should have said it to her face ten years ago.

The distance I had been keeping between the performance and the truth closed completely.

I leaned in and kissed her softly on the dock.

There was absolutely nothing fake about it.

We pulled back breathless and stunned.

Then a small voice spoke from the shadows behind us.

Tyler stood at the edge of the dock in his pajamas.

His bottom lip trembled as he looked up at me and asked, “Are you going to leave on Sunday like everyone else does?”