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Alana smiled. “Is this Cal loud enough to handle my best friend?”

“Sometimes louder,” she quipped. “Wait ’til you get him started on hairbands.”

“Hairbands?!”

“When you meet him, you can ask him about it. It’s a whole thing.”

She squeezed Tess’s shoulder one last time. “Looking forward to it.”

Bear made his way to the top of the slope, and when he saw Alana, he gave up returning the toy to Leo and bounded in their direction.

Alana bent to scratch between Bear’s ears, retrieving the toy he gingerly carried between his teeth.

Tess joined her, rubbing the side of Bear’s belly. “Aren’t you such a good boy?”

Bear purred like a cat from the attention. He lay down on his side, then rolled to his back, clearly reveling in the coos and good boys from the girls as they scratched his belly.

A shadow above them blocked the mid-morning sun. Alana felt a water droplet plink onto her thigh.

“I keep telling him he needs to stop begging for attention,” said Leo.

She peered up at him, and the sight was devastating. The water from his morning swim clung to his hair, small trickles curling at the corners by his ears and down his cheeks.

“Maybe because someone isn’t getting enough attention at home,” she teased.

Tess snorted. Alana beamed at the sound, and the fact that she was finally around someone who wasn’t constantly reminding her to be nicer. It was one of the reasons she loved Tess so much. Her best friend took her snark and matched it.

“Oh, he gets enough attention. He’s just spoiled.”

“He deserves to be,” Tess replied, pushing her lips into a pouty face. “He’s such a cutie patootie.”

Bear wagged his tail aggressively at that.

Leo rolled his eyes. He pushed his hair off his face, his biceps flexing.

Alana swallowed, then turned her attention back to Bear and the art of giving him the perfect belly rub.

“Any news from Sophie?” he asked. “How’d the first round of videos do?”

“One is certainly making its way around town,” Alana teased, eyeing Tess.

Tess stuck out her tongue, then pulled her phone from her back pocket. “Last time I checked, it had five hundred likes.”

Alana bolted upright. “Did you say five hundred?”

Tess held up her phone. Sure enough, the video’s likes were in the three digits. But now they were closer to a thousand. There were also well over a hundred comments.

“Holy shit.” Alana grinned. “She did it. It’s working.”

Tess looked at the two of them with a merciless smirk. “Want to know what they’re saying in the comments?”

“You’re joking.”

Sophie shook her head. She had yet to stop smiling at the two of them, and while the sight of her sister’s smile usually put Alana in good spirits, watching it now was grating on her, like nails on a chalkboard.

“One commenter said your chemistry is off the charts,” she teased. “They say the way Leo looks at you is hashtag yearn city.”

“Hashtag…yearn city?” Leo repeated, looking wholly out of his element. He was standing in the middle of Sophie’s room wearing a fresh Marien T-shirt and a towel wrapped around his waist.