House and wealth are inherited from fathers, but a prudent wife is from the Lord. Proverbs 19:14

I KNEW I HAD said yes to Georgia's proposal.

But I was getting cold feet.

We had yet to procure a marriage license, but with the immigration offices breathing down my neck to either acquire a visa or get out of the country, it would be sooner or later.

For someone who'd spent so much of his life drifting through various nations, unbounded by commitment or love or duty, marriage felt like something I should run away from.

Yet it wasn't. Not for me. Not right now. Instead, what bothered me was not marriage or its institution or even its frippery in the form of too-extravagant weddings. What bothered me was, well, the fact that it was fake.

Georgia wasn't a girl I wanted to fake-marry. She deserved a real marriage.

As I jogged through Central Park, keeping an eye out for muggers–at least I had brought neither wallet nor cell phone out with me–I wondered why it was the girl who deserved a real relationship would be so hesitant to get into any.

She didn't care about men; all her casual flirtations had been blown up by tabloids into more than they were; her smiles were reserved for her friends and family. And, on a rare occasion, in a singular, glowing, radiant moment, for me.

Before I wrecked whatever could have happened between us into a tangle of complex emotions and broken hearts by not calling her in Italy.

I spied a portrait artist doing caricatures in the centre of the park. I wondered if that might be me. Certainly, if I couldn't get anything else to do.

I slowed my pace to a walk in front of a newspaper stand and took one of the now-obsolete issues. Unfolding it, my eyes scanned the job postings just as they had every day. I'd never lasted long in any job. Call it a lack of experience, an instant dislike for authority, or simply some other foible, but I couldn't hold down a job longer than a week.

Which was probably part of the reason Georgia Philips was offering me a fake engagement out of pity.

My gaze snagged on one opening. GUEST LECTURER KNOWLEDGEABLE IN THE SUBJECT OF ART. The pay was astronomical and the hours looked decent. They didn't require any teaching experience, but only "demonstrable experience in the art field and proven knowledge of Renaissance art." I had both. Didn't I?

I refolded the newspaper, tucked it under my arm, and began jogging back towards the cozily furnished apartment that Georgia Philips shared with her mother.

+

"JOB-HUNTING?" MAY PHILIPS asked me as I arrived back in the apartment, wiping sweat off my forehead with a towel.

"Yeah." I cracked a smile at the older woman who reminded me of my own mother. Both had been upper-crust socialites with a love of art. The only difference was, my mother's reserved, prim, and proper demeanour had been passed down to my sister, Katerina, while Georgia's eccentricity and capriciousness were inherited from her mother. "Do you need help with anything?"

I liked being her errand boy. She paid in home-cooked meals and affectionate remarks that made me feel as though I still had parents. Even if Georgia couldn't understand–or bring herself to approve of–the fact that her mother seemed to like me more than she liked Georgia, I appreciated May Philips' company.

"If you could water the flowers, dear," she said, pushing her glasses up her nose as she examined her latest find. May Philips was a lover of antiquities, scrounging them up everywhere from yard sales or even Christie's, when she had the money for it. "The orchids are looking a little sad."

I chuckled as I grabbed the watering can. She liked to talk to her flowers, which I thought was slightly kooky, but apparently it made them grow better.

I, personally, had no idea how to talk to plants. It wasn't like it was with dogs, where you could give them a treat, pat them on the head, and call them a good boy for fetching your slippers. So, I just added orchid food to the water and began pouring it into the pot.

"Talk to them," May ordered, setting down the vase she had been looking at. It appeared Grecian, with the signature red and black colouring of military figures on its glazed surface. "The plants, I mean."

I cleared my throat. "Um, the weather's really nice out, isn't it?"

May sighed. "The plants wouldn't know. They've never been outside. Now you're just making them sad."

I chuckled. Even her scoldings, I could take good-naturedly, knowing they were nothing compared to those of my late father. I decided to sing instead. "Grow, grow, grow some more..."

When Georgia opened the door, I had just begun the second verse of Row, Row, Row your boat. She hopped onto a barstool next to the Grecian urn and began laughing at my musical efforts. "Really, Mom? This is what you have George doing? What's next, giving pep talks to the produce?"

"Georgia," her mother said, a faint chastisement evident in her tone. "How was school?"

I'd forgotten that Georgia was in her last year of her anthropology degree, a program that had been lengthened by her frequent need to fly out of the country on high fashion shoots.

"Boring." She shrugged. "I ran into Abigail, though, and we chatted."

"How is she doing? Is she still with her boyfriend?..." Their conversation encircled the two of them, blonde heads bent close together, and I made myself busy by watering the plants.

I was a guest here. Even if May–or Aunt May, as she insisted I call her–wanted to treat me like family. It was best that I remember that, not throw myself into familial arrangements that would collapse like a house of cards under me.

No, it was best to remember what I had always been; what I would always be: an outsider.

+

THAT NIGHT, I CAREFULLY filled out my resume and called art galleries around the world to provide a reference for me. Maybe I would get the art lecturer job, or I wouldn't, but having a plan was better than living on the goodwill of near-strangers, no matter how close I had once been or thought I could be to Georgia Philips.

Though my bank account was full, topped off by a sizeable inheritance I'd never touched out of guilt, and numerous patrons I'd had who liked my art, not to mention a small side business I had that sold my art prints on Etsy–despite all of that, I was occupied by the listless need to do something.

To make something of myself. To make someone of myself.

I had been someone before. I'd been an artist. Then Georgia Philips had crashed into my life, all eccentricity and wild abandon and bold daring, and I'd forgotten how to draw anything but the way the light slanted across her cheeks and the precise blue of her eyes.

I'd painted her in a dozen poses, a dozen fragmented sketches started of her and never finished, balled up in frustration in a tiny Italian apartment, cursing myself for not calling her and then cursing myself for wanting to. I'd never thought I would see her again. Yet I had.

Fate kept drawing us back together. Or maybe it was the God I didn't want to–couldn't–face.

After ll, what God would want me? If I was a prodigal son, I was a prodigal who had no father ot return to, no family to receive me but my sister. My sister, who'd never complained about the burden I had placed upon her until that explosive moment in the Steele penthouse. My sister, who'd borne every burden I should have taken up, and done it all with silent, steely resolve and a faith far greater than mine. My sister was good.

Me? I had no home to return to and no father to welcome me, earthly or heavenly. How would I even begin to try?

I flipped open my wallet and pulled out the worn picture, staring at it as I had half a thousand times before. I rubbed my thumb over the laminated charcoal sketch, coloured in gold and blue and peach, never quite managing to capture the precise expression when she looked at me, not quite a smile, but not quite cold either. Waiting to be impressed, but expecting to be disappointed. Yet never scrutinizing or inspecting, never making me feel like I'd failed.

She was my fake fiance, after all. Perhaps I should have greeted her with a kiss, but we'd kissed too many times before for me to convince her that I wanted this one to be real.

Those moments had been mistakes–not that she had been a mistake–but they had been angry, heated words turning into angry, heated movements, passion and pain and desperation mingling together into something nowhere close to love.

A knock on my door alerted me to her presence. No one else knocked three times, just like that, the last one like an afterthought with its gap between the second and third beat. "Come in."

Georgia entered, casting an eye about the room. "I like what you've done with the place."

Half-finished canvases draped in white cloth sat in a corner, stark against the same hunter-green paint that had been there since before I'd moved in. A lime-green comforter was strewn over the double bed, and I'd taped up famous art prints. A cheap copy of Van Gogh's Sunflowers fluttered in the breeze from the open window.

"You say that every time you're here." It was true, but I didn't want to tell her that I'd miss her approval if she decided to one day stop giving it.

"It's always true." She sat on the lime-green quilt, her white overalls standing out against the garishly bright fabric. "You've decided?"

"Decided to marry you?" I swallowed. "We do have a marriage license waiting for us at the end of sixty days..."

Though we hadn't informed the rest of the Steele family, of which my sister was now a part, I knew that sooner or later, we'd have to make this fake engagement seem real.

If only I didn't want it to be real.

"You're still in, then?" Her shoulders relaxed. "That's good..."

"Why do you care so much about where I live, Georgia?" I asked suddenly. In all the weeks that we'd been pretending, she had never told me. "Does it matter to you whether I'm here or in Montreal or Toronto?"

"It matters," she said slowly. "It would matter to Katerina. She's my friend."

"Okay," I said. The distance between my swivelling desk chair and the bed shrank by an inch, then two. My knee brushed hers. "Good to know she's got someone looking out for her."

"That's all I care about," Georgia said with a weak smile. She got up. "Good night, George."

But who was looking out for Georgia?