No Fangs, No Flowers

Lila Brandt has arranged flowers for forty weddings and attended none of them. Then the Halloran family pays off her shop's mortgage for one service: marry Ellis Halloran, the family's youngest son, in a quiet civic ceremony so he inherits his grandmother's estate before his brother contests it. Ellis is a hundred and forty, works as a rare-book appraiser, and has dodged marriage for a century because of one human he met in 1972. Lila agrees for the mortgage and plans a clean annulment. She doesn't plan on roommates, then friendship, then something she won't name. When the estate hearing forces her to testify, she has to decide whether the marriage is still pretend. It isn't.