“Thorn, you can’t honestly care what these lunatics think after this,” Nick told her.
She sighed. “My mom is the tarot reader, and my aunt is the hotline psychic. My grandmother is a famous medium, and I’m somewhere in the middle.”
“Sidekick? Who’s got a sidekick?” Miguel demanded.
“Not ‘sidekick.’Psychic!” Carmela shouted.
“Who’s psychic?” his dad scoffed.
“No one is,” Marie chided. “But Nick’s friend Riley thinks she is.” She twirled a finger around her ear in the universal sign for cuckoo.
“She doesn’tthinkshe is, Mom. She is.”
“Wait a minute.” Andy shoved his glasses up his nose. “This sounds vaguely familiar.”
“My family doesn’t watch the news,” Nick explained.
“Ever?” Riley asked.
“Just Griffin Gentry in the mornings. He and that Bella Goodshine are so cute together,” Marie crooned.
“A psychic,” Carmela said. “My friend Trina went to one in Virginia after her mother died. Do you know her?”
“Your friend’s mother or the psychic?” Riley asked.
“The psychic. She ripped off my friend to the tune of four hundred dollars and said her mother was finally at peace.”
“Trina is an asshole. Maybe her mother was finally at peace,” Nick said.
Carmela snorted. “That woman was hell on wheels her entire life. Death wasn’t going to change that.”
“Do you talk to dead people?” Esmeralda asked Riley.
She shrugged, then nodded. “Sometimes.”
“No, she doesn’t, sweetie,” Marie insisted. “She just says she does so she can take people’s money. No offense.”
“Offense taken big time,” Nick countered.
“It’s fine,” Riley insisted.
He shook his head. “Trust me. You don’t want to start things off as a doormat.”
“Good point.”
“When are you going to get yourself a real job, Nicky? Stop playing peeping tom—” Miguel shouted.
“Private eye!” Nick corrected him.
“Whatever,” Miguel said. “You come from a long line of hard-working Mexican people. Your great-grandmother came to this country with only fifty thousand dollars to her name. Where is your appreciation for your heritage?”
Riley blinked.
“Dad’s great-grandparents were loaded,” Nick explained. “He likes to pretend he’s a self-made man, but he started his first restaurant with his trust fund. The last time he went to Mexico, it was a five-star, all-inclusive resort in Cancun.”
“Mexican-Canadianpeople,” Marie reminded everyone sternly so as not to leave out her side of the family tree.
“Yay, Tim Hortons,” Carmela said with an eye-roll.
