I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up

Morimoto knows the routine all too well. As a young professional building her career in Japan, she should be free to live life on her own terms—yet her parents refuse to ease up, bombarding her with relentless questions about why she is still single. In their eyes, there is only one acceptable path forward: settling down with a husband. And even if she ever did bring home a suitor, she has no doubt they would pick apart her choice until nothing remained but frustration and second-guessing. Then comes an offer she never saw coming. A coworker—a woman who has quietly harbored a crush on her—steps forward with an unconventional solution: a sham marriage in which the two of them would become wives. With a woman standing at her side, surely her parents would be left with nothing to criticize, and the pressure would finally lift. On paper, it seems like the perfect escape—an arrangement built on convenience rather than affection. But sharing a life under the label of a "fake" marriage has a way of blurring the line between pretense and truth, and what begins as an act may stir up feelings that are anything but.