I hug her back. “You weren’t a weirdo. You were exactly what I needed. Now take me to our cacao beans!”
Pebbles dances at our feet while we head to the kitchen, which takes up half the house. We’re building an industrial kitchen to support the ramping up we expect to do next year, too, whenallmy cacao farms start producing en masse so that we can actually run a sustainable chocolate business.
The beautiful thing about being a Lightly heiress?
I don’t need any of this to work or to make money rightnow.
We can quietly build the backbone for a small empire, paying all the staff we need and supporting the local town so it, too, can grow to support having a small chocolate empire here, without many questions.
I reach into my pocket to toss my phone aside, but before it hits the metal countertop, it starts ringing.
Naomi cracks up. “Is that the Wicked Witch of the West’s theme song?”
“Yes.”
I stare at the screen.Gigi Khan.
Her name’s actually Estelle Lightly, but she’s like Genghis Khan reincarnated, if Genghis Khan came back as a rich Upper East Side grandmother and eviscerated people socially instead of actually murdering them, and she insists the family call herGigi, so I labeled her appropriately in my phone.
“Are you going to answer it?” Naomi asks.
My face twitches in a way that would make my mother tell me I’ll get wrinkles, and thinking about my mother telling me I’ll get wrinkles makes my face twitch even more.
No one in Costa Rica cares if I get wrinkles. Pebbles doesn’t care. Naomi doesn’t care.
They don’t care that I’ll age out of the influencer system if I haven’t made something bigger of my name before I’m thirty, and now I’m thinking about my mother telling me not to eat any of this chocolate, because it’ll go straight to my hips.
“Life is meant to be lived, not staged, Tavi,” Naomi’s forever telling me. And then she always points to her own hips. “And do you love me less for these?”
Of course I don’t. But while Ihearher, a lifetime ofoh, honey, I wish you’d gotten your sister’s slender genestakes some time to overcome. Especially while I need this influencer gig to pay the bills for the things that truly matter.
The song keeps playing.
Naomi’s eyebrows lift. “I’ve never heard that ringtone on your phone before.”
“She doesn’t call often.”
“She?”
“My grandmother.” I snatch the damn phone with a sigh. “If I don’t answer, God knows what she’ll do.”
I brace myself, blow out a slow breath, and then put on my fake happy face and brainless-social-media-queen attitude before answering. “Hey, Gigi! Oh my gosh, I was, like, just thinking about you!”
“Octavia.”
Dammit.That’s herI am displeasedvoice. I head back outside, because I don’t want the chocolates getting Gigi vibes on them.
Talk about something that’ll ruin you. “Yes, Gigi?”
“I choked and nearly died three weeks ago, and all you did was send a card. A card with a ridiculous round yellow happy face on the front.”
“But you didn’t die, Gigi! You lived! That’s worth celebrating!” God, I hate playing the ditz.
Hate hate hateit.
But my sister, Phoebe, is thesmart, attractive businesswoman.
I’m the chunky one who got lucky that she was already famous from the child beauty pageant scene before her hips started developing and that she can now apply enough makeup to make a living as an Instagram influencer.
