“My trust fund just dried up, but it’s a blip. I swear. Just—don’t panic. Stay here. Don’t tell anyone that anything’s wrong. I’ll fix this. I’ll smooth it over. And everything will be okay. Okay?”
She nods.
She nods, because she believes in me.
Ironic.
I don’t actually believe in myself.
ButI have to.
This is my dream.
The people here are my friends.
This town and my farm are my home.
Naomi gave up her entire life to go on this journey with me.
I’ll make this okay.
I will.
“I’m sure once I get back to the States, she’ll realize she’s being unreasonable, and I’ll be back by the weekend. This will be okay. We can do this.We can do this.”
We have to.
We’ve put too much into our dream to lose it now.
Chapter 2
Dylan Wright, aka a Small-Town Plumber Who Knows How to Keep Secrets
Present day ...
There’s nothing like poker night, and tonight is nothing like poker night.
It’s a little more ... interesting.
“Who invited the tofu?” Jane Stewart mutters. She’s a Black lady who can fish all of us under the table, and she gets mad when I say she’s one of my favorite people in Tickled Pink, since she thinks it’s all about the home brew she makes and sells in her garage.
Willie Wayne Jorgensen, a white guy a few years older than me who quietly keeps the town running by doing all the jobs necessary to keep a small town running, pulls up a chair at the card table under the buzzing light in the bunker that serves as our secret hideout. “Wasn’t me.”
“I would’ve invited my wife before I invited one ofthem,” Ridhi Denning, a brown-skinned woman who suffers no fools and runs Tickled Pink’s only café, says. “And she’s a terrible poker player.”
They all turn to me.
I lift my hands. “Don’t look at me. She’d have to talk to me for me to have invited her.”
Theherin question is five feet, three inches of brown-haired, white-skinned, round-cheeked, fancy-outfit-wearing, teacup-Yorkie-carrying, perpetually working-out, vegan and sugar-free social media influencer Octavia Lightly.
And that’s only half of her adjectives.
She belongs here in Tickled Pink, Wisconsin, about like I’d belong in a limo heading to a private jet about to take me to a concert I was headlining in Monaco, which isn’t her fault.
Not the part where I’m not a rock star. That’s all on me for poor life choices.
But the part where Tavi happens to be stuck here in Tickled Pink. Been an interesting couple of months since the Lightly family arrived thinking this was where they could improve their souls, that’s for sure.
