“Mom,” Grady said her name.
When she didn’t respond he said it louder. “Mom!”
Still nothing.
He walked over and gently touched her arm.
“Ahh!” She shrieked and jumped in her bed causing her laptop to slide off her legs. Grady reached down and grabbed it before it hit the floor. He set it back down beside her and she swatted his arm and shouted. “Why did you sneak up on me?!”
“I said your name, you couldn’t hear me.” Grady motioned to his own ears reminding her what she was wearing.
“Oh!” His mom pulled the headphones off and when she did she noticed Liv standing by the doorway.
Grady stepped back beside her and put his hand on Liv’s lower back as he introduced her. “Mom this is Olive St. Claire, Liv this is my mom, Sylvia Caldwell.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Caldwell.”
A huge smile spread on his mom’s face. “It is very nice to meet you, Olive.”
“You can call me Liv. I’m so sorry that we scared you.”
“You can call me Sylvia and it’s fine. I shouldn’t have had the volume up so loud. I’m on the final season of Game of Thrones and there’s a big battle going on at Winterfell.”
“You’re already on the final season?” Grady asked. His mom had just started the series at the beginning of the week.
“I’m flying through them.” His mom shut her computer screen and motioned to the chairs. “Sit down, sit down.”
Grady pulled up the beige padded chair for Liv and grabbed the wooden chair for himself. Before their butts hit the seats his mom waved her hand between them. “So, are you two…?”
“We’re dating,” Grady blurted out. He knew they’d talked about telling his mom the truth, but that was his truth.
“Sort of,” Liv clarified.
He didn’t like that Liv kept making it clear that what they were doing was fake. This wasn’t fake to him. But he didn’t want to say that and scare her off.
“Sort of?” His mom’s brows arched. “Sort of like you two are changing your Facebook status to it’s complicated?”
Liv looked at him and then back at his mom. “Grady agreed to go to my cousin’s wedding with me because, well, it was supposed to be my wedding but six months ago my fiancé called it off so I had to cancel everything. My cousin decided to take advantage of that and booked all of my vendors—”
“She even bought Liv’s dress on eBay.” Grady wasn’t sure why that was what rubbed him the wrong way, but it did.
“She did not!” His mom looked appropriately scandalized by that fact.
“She did,” Liv confirmed. “And when my ex showed up at the rehearsal dinner with a date Chrissy suggested—”
“Oh, you know Chrissy?” His mom’s face lit up at the mention of her daughter-in-law.
“Um, yeah, I did when we were kids. I used to come to Whisper Lake in the summers. She suggested that Grady go to the wedding as my date and then since I’m going home today, he can tell people that we’re dating for…the next few months… and hopefully the town matchmakers will give him a break.”
His mom looked between him and Liv. He could tell she wasn’t buying the fake dating thing. He knew that she saw right through him and could tell that nothing about this was fake…for him, anyway. “Chrissy’s a very smart lady.”
“Yes, she is,” Liv readily agreed.
His mom smiled a smile that he hadn’t seen out of her in a long time. It was her mischievous smile. She was having fun with this situation, and she didn’t even know the half of it. He hadn’t even told her how they’d met.
Seeing a light in his mom’s eye, and that particular smile on her face, made Grady’s eyes water with unshed tears. It was the same look and smile she’d get when she was going to give his dad a hard time, or if she was going to tease one of her sons about something. He missed those days, when Jim wasn’t a complete and total asshole, his dad was still here, and his mom wasn’t sick.
She sat up straighter in her bed and placed her hands on her lap. “So, you came here so I could meet my son’s fake girlfriend?”