And the very most important question of all—
Where the hellisTavi?
Chapter 33
Tavi
I’m getting dressed for drinks with our prospective investor when I decide it’s a good idea to check the comments on Dylan’s latest TikTok.
I miss him.
I left Tickled Pinktoday—super early today, like so early it barely qualified as today, but stilltoday—and while Costa Rica has been the place where I’ve felt most at home the past few years, today, right now, it’s lacking.
Not because I’m in the city instead of on the farm.
But because he’s not here with me.
Stupid, right? He can’t just move to Costa Rica with me. He loves Tickled Pink. And they love and need him. In a lot of ways, I think he needs them too. They’re his family. The people who have stuck with him and forgiven him and worried about him and done family the right way.
His smiling face pops up in his TikTok profile, and I both smile and fight back tears.
I wish he were here.
“Tavi?” Naomi says behind me.
I sniff deeply and blink quickly to suck back in all the feelings and close the app before I make eye contact with her in the small mirror over my wobbly dresser in the rental house’s bedroom. “Hey.”
“You okay?” she asks.
“Yes. Yes! Nervous, but totally okay.”
She eyeballs me.
I force a smile as I turn to face her.
Her eyeball gets eyeballier. “You miss Dylan.”
“I—he—we—”
“Fell in love,” she finishes for me.
“No.”
She quirks a brow at me, and I know exactly what that brow quirk means. It means,You’re a flake, Tavi, and you go where the wind blows you, and now you’re thinking about giving up everything we’ve worked for to go try out being in love with a small-town guy.
Okay, it doesn’t. She wouldn’t say that.
I’ll say it about myself for her, though. Until the farm, I was forever finding new hobbies, new places to travel, new guys to date, and new angles for all my socials. “Naomi. I amnotabandoning you. I’m not staying in Tickled Pink. I’mhere. Men come and go. The farm—you—this life—I—”
“Much as I hate the idea that women are supposed to stretch to have it all, if there’s any one person in this world who can do it, do it well, and still thrive, it’s you. We’ll figure it out. Don’t give up on love. Don’tevergive up on love. It’s the one thing that matters most.”
“I loveyou.”
“Not the way you love Dylan. And that’s okay. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Naomi.You and I—we’ve workedso hardto turn the farm around, and we’rethis closeto taking this from a little hobby to save a small slice of the earth to something bigger, something real, something thatmatters, something that gives me a purpose and makes me feel like I belongfor the first time in my life, and I’m not throwing that away for both of us just because I have a crush on a man.”
“A crush.”
