My Dying Mother Wanted to See Me Engaged Before Christmas. So I Asked My Best Friend’s Sister to Pretend

Her name was Nora Bellamy. She was 46, the younger sister of my best friend from college, Will. She ran a bookshop in Rhinebeck, twenty minutes from my mother’s farm.

Nora had known me since she was fifteen. She’d watched me become rich. She had never once been impressed.

“You want me to what?” she said on the phone.

“Pretend to be engaged to me. For my mother. Until… until spring.”

There was a long silence.

“Theo,” she said. “That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had. And you invested in a company that made smart toothbrushes.”

“I know.”

“Why me?”

“Because my mother has loved you since you were fifteen,” I said. “Because you’re the only woman I know who she’d actually believe. And because you’re the only person in my life who’s never wanted anything from me.”

Another long silence.

“My shop is about to go under,” Nora said finally. “The landlord is raising the rent. I’ve got a business loan I can’t pay.”

“Then let me…”

“No,” she said sharply. “I’m not doing this for money, Theo. If I do this, I do it for Eleanor.”

She did it for Eleanor.

The next Saturday, in the snowy orchard behind my mother’s house, while my mother watched from the window, I got down on one knee in front of Nora Bellamy with a ring I’d bought that morning.

She started laughing before I even opened the box.