Mist Opportunity

Lisa Nowak runs the Birchwood Marina and the Gull & Anchor, the dock bar where the whole town ends up on a summer night. She knows every drink order and every boat on the lake. Most of Birchwood would struggle to describe her face.

That part is magic. Lisa is a witch, though she would never put it that way. She can pull the lake mist around anything she would rather nobody looked at too closely, and for most of her life that has included herself.

Then a downstate firm sends a consultant to size up her marina for a sale she never asked for. Mark Halvorsen is polite, precise, and paid to see straight through anyone's hopeful story. He is also the first person in years who looks right at her.

So when he walks into a packed Gull & Anchor before anyone knows who he is, Lisa panics and introduces him as her boyfriend.

Now the whole town is invested. The mist is working overtime. And Duchess, the white cockatoo who runs the marina gift shop, keeps saying the true thing out loud at the worst possible moment.

The fake part was supposed to be easy. It is the real part that has her worried.