Page 111

“Do you still want them?” Joss asks softly.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Do you love them?” Ivy asks, stars in her eyes.

“Yes,” I say again, crying softly.

“Then you’ll go. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. But for the festival.”

I tremble. “There’s so much left to do⁠—”

“We’ll go,” the Sugarplums say in unison.

I blink at them. “You will?”

“We’ll help. We’ll go for you, tomorrow. Then you can show up on Saturday refreshed,” Del suggests.

I sniffle. “You’d do that for me?”

“Of course we would,” Hazel says matter-of-factly. “What else are friends for?”

I smile at them through tears, and the next hour we eat and they comfort me. They tell me I can do this, that I should be angry instead of sad.

But I can’t stop thinking about how all of this affects my business. My life.

Hazel doesn’t want to let me go home alone.

“I need to,” I tell her. “I need some time.”

I barely sleep, tossing and turning, seeing the anger on Marcus’s face, how Cole’s expression shuttered, how Gabe went quiet and sad.

I wake up the next morning determined to talk to them. To tell them everything.

But before I’m even out of bed or dressed in anything other than my cat pajamas, someone bangs on my door.

I jolt upright in bed, my heart in my throat.

Is it Marcus?

Maybe Hazel, checking on me?

I hurry to the door and look out of the peephole to see the crown of my mother’s head.

I draw in a deep, deep breath and open the door.

“Margarita,” she says, barreling past me. “What is going on? Everyone in town is talking about your…”

She trails off.

“My what?” I ask, jaw tight, anger finally rushing through me.

What right does this town have to police who I date, who I sleep with? What right does my mother have?

“Three men?” she hisses. “Fun is one thing, mija. The whole parish is talking. I knew you were too young for this. I knew that you couldn’t hold it together.”

“I’m holding it together just fine,” I grind out, but Maria Reyes is on a roll.

“You’re embarrassing yourself, mija,” she says, almost gently, and it makes the anger recede, something more like shame replacing it. “Making a spectacle of yourself and your business.”