I flap my hands. “Forreals, Dylan. You should, like, go sleep. You had a serious brain injury just, like, aweekago, and then there was all that trauma with the chicken and having to put up with Gigi all day, and me too.”
“We should talk about that kiss.”
“What kiss? There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Tavi—”
“What kiss?” Phoebe asks.
Yes, Phoebe.
My sister.
The tall, slender, not-quite-natural blonde who’s standing in the doorway now too.
“Would someone please lock that damn door?” And here I go with the screeching and shrieking.
Pebbles grumbles in her case.
Phoebe smiles at me.
Dylan ducks his head, clears his throat, and goes back to sampling my chocolates.
“Stop smiling,” I order Phoebe.
“I’m not smiling.”
I growl.
She smiles broader.
I sigh and go back to scrubbing the floor.
Tonight’s wasted. No work. No recipes. No mint. And I’m running low on the raw chocolate bars Naomi sent.
She’s tried helping with recipes and production, but her talents lie in helping Sebastián around the farm and in crunching numbers to tell me just how dire things are. Once we get an investor or three, we’ll probably pay a professional chocolatier to help out, because I truly am running off what I learned in an online master class, and I’m sure I’m screwing things up, because that’s what I do.
“Okay, okay, I’ll quit smiling,” Phoebe says. “I just saw Gigi at Ladyfingers, and I reminded her that forgiveness is good for her soul. You’re welcome.”
“Thank you,” I mutter. I’m grateful. I am.
But I’m also frustrated that Phoebe can mouth off to Gigi and get away with it, when she’s barely started being a nice human being, and I’ve put so much effort into self-improvement over the years with zero acknowledgment.
Phoebe props a hip against the table and sticks her fingers in the spilled chocolate too. “She still insists she’s destroying the video of her getting smacked with a chicken thigh that came out of a toilet, which seems like a story I need to hear.”
Mind made up.
We’re taking that video live. “Dylan wants to be a TikTok star. I mean, the kind that does good by helping people understand how to fix little plumbing issues themselves, with lots of shout-outs to Tickled Pink so that when you’re done building the new Ferris wheel, people will come.”
“That’s not quite—” Dylan starts.
“It’s not, like,myfault Gigi insisted on standing in the danger zone in that bathroom today. Or that that chicken thigh had bones in it that got stuck in her hair. And do you know how wild the internetwill go when Dylan’s first video is of me lifting a toilet set and accidentally flinging a raw dead poultry at Gigi? Like, I’ll have to do my own TikTok talking about how I gave the poor thigh a proper burial since that chicken never should’ve been sacrificed in the first place. Boom. Viral.”
Phoebe’s green eyes track me as I move across the floor, cleaning up more chocolate, wondering—again—how I’ll sneak all of this to the laundromat without anyone asking why I have chocolate-soaked rags.
“She also said she’s loaning Lola the money to buy this church because she thinksLola’s Holy Houseis a much more marketable idea thanLola’s School House,” Phoebe continues.
I gasp. “Did she tell Lola that?”
