Snaggletooth Creek—the Toothto us locals—is small, but it’s not so small that you run into everyone every time you turn around. Especially when I live on the east side of town, where my family’s company’s world headquarters are located, and last I heard, Theo lives in a single-wide at the edge of his dad’s property just beyond the western boundaries of our little mountain town. While I’ll go have lunch or coffee downtown, Theo spends his off-time rock climbing or snowboarding or kayaking anywherebutthe heart of the Tooth. Or so I gather from hearing Emma talk about him occasionally. I don’t think I’ve seen him in person in four or five years. And definitely not shirtless. And definitely not grinning at me the way he’s grinning at Claire.
Ew.
This is mortifying.
“Oh, god, Laney, you were my last hope,” Emma whispers. “Please don’t fall for the Theo glow-up.”
I blink, shake my head, and school my expression while I look back at her. “Does he still have the same personality?”
She cracks up, and this is such a real, genuine amusement that my shoulders relax.
“Yes,” she says firmly. “So much yes.”
“I think we’re clear then.” Except as I’m saying it, the rest of our conversation catches up with me and clicks into place.
Oh, no.
Oh, no no no.
“So you’ll do it?” she says. “You’ll baby—erm, be the wall between Chandler and Theo?”
I’m all the way around the pool from Chandler, where he’s sitting with his triplet cousins who are serving as his groomsmen. They’re at a far table with a great view of the sunset, and even from here, I can see his lip curl in irritation while he, too, watches Theo. He’s tapping something that looks like a tennis racket against the edge of the table while he scowls.
This wedding? A week of sun, fun, and being a tourist with her family and best friends while everything’s cold and snowy in the mountains back home?
This is Emma’sdream.
She grew up in a crumbling cabin just outside of town limits. When we were little, my parents ran a local T-shirt shop and her dad owned a small taxidermy business.
With the internet age, our families’ businesses have both expanded.
But hers doesn’t have quite the same level of respectability around town that mine does.
Never has. Not even when her mom was alive and driving our bus to school.
And I know it bothers her that she’s celebrated back home asthat Monroe girl who overcame her humble beginnings to make something of herself.
Making somethingof herself was coming home with an accounting degree and starting an accounting firm that now does taxes for half the town. And she loves it.
Marrying Chandler and starting a family?
This is the final cherry on Emma’s dream life sundae.
“Of course I’ll do it,” I say with what I hope is all the conviction I need to believe myself too.
Theo can be a dick, and he wouldn’t know responsibility if it did a striptease for him on top of Ol’ Snaggletooth, the gold miner statue in front of city hall back home. Emma’s quit fretting that she’ll have to support him in old age, but I suspect it’s more out of loyalty to family and not wanting to talk bad about him to anyone than it is that she no longer worries about him. But heisknown for having fun.
So the flamingo costume? The flirting? The drinks?
It’s all perfectlyTheo.
“I’d ask Sabrina, but she’s been making these faces at him—” Emma starts.
“Awesome,” I sigh before I can stop myself.
“—and I’m sure it’s just loyalty to Chandler since he’s her cousin and they work together and everything, and Chandler wasreallymad this afternoon because he’s stressed—”
“Everyone wants everything to go right the week of your wedding.”
