Reid took another swallow of his drink, his posture a little looser than a few minutes before.
Azalea nodded to them. The other four took off their shoes so their feet would be silent. They rushed up the dark wood staircase and tore through Reid Briar’s things.
Estrella and Dalia threw aside clothes and cuff links, books and boar-bristle shave brushes.
“Don’t go so fast,” Gloria said. “We have to put everything back where it was.”
Dalia found a stack of papers in the lining of Reid’s suitcase. She let out a whispered but triumphant, “Yes.”
The heavy sheet of the cover page was printed with a lawyer’s letterhead. Estrella caught several copies of a court seal. But the sentences, thick and dry, were slow to give up their secrets.
“It’s in legal,” Azalea said.
“Give me that.” Calla snatched the papers, dividing them between her and Gloria.
They skimmed the pages, leafing through.
Their glances flicked up at each other at the same time.
They caught each other’s eyes and fell into laughter so heavy they tumbled onto the thick duvet covering the bed.
“What?” Estrella asked.
The two laughing cousins tried to sit up, but one look at each other, and the laughter pulled them both under. The papers scattered over them like leaves.
Dalia grabbed at a sheaf of papers.
“Hey,” Calla said, still laughing.
“As best I can tell,” Gloria said, swallowing her own laughter, not looking at Calla in case it started her up again, “this shining tribute to the Briar name”—she consulted the papers again—“attended a party at another family’s estate and started a fire that caused a fortune of damage before they could get it out.”
Calla giggled, handing Dalia the letters to and from the lawyer’s office. “He was trying to show off by lighting a cigar with a candelabra.”
“That’s not funny,” Estrella said. “What if somebody was hurt?”
Gloria passed Estrella one of the papers. “Nobody was.” She leaned on her elbow, the duvet fluffing up around her. “Unless you count the Briars’ bank accounts. They paid for everything.”
Dalia shook her head at the papers. “So that’s what he’s doing here.”
“What do you mean?” Estrella asked.
“He thinks he can make money here,” Dalia said. “He wants to repay it. Get back in their good graces.”
“Fat chance of that,” Calla said. “Did you see the amount?” She fell back onto the bed. “All those priceless books.”
“Irreplaceable artwork,” Gloria said. “Antique furniture.”
“And the piano,” Calla said, still lying down but lifting a finger into the air. “Don’t forget the piano.”
Dalia still shook her head. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Gloria asked, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes.
“This is where Briars get exiled,” Dalia said. “No one ever came here because they wanted to. They sent him here.”
The truth settled over Estrella.
La Pradera, as beautiful as the gardens made it, was the place the Briars banished relatives they wanted out of the way. Marjorie’s father, with his shameful legacy she would never speak of. Bay, a child made by a Briar daughter’s affair. And now Reid, who had cost his family more money than Estrella thought books and a piano could be worth.
A hundred years ago, this land was the ugliest of the Briars’ estates. The great house stood on rocky ground overlooking a barren ravine. The Nomeolvides women had been making a home in town but were a few Sundays from being driven out as witches. Anywhere they tried to live, peonies and flowering willows broke through rafters. Water lilies choked ponds and streams.
So the outcast Briars issued to these women an invitation: If you can grow anything on this land, you can live here, too. The Nomeolvides women answered by turning this place into La Pradera, acres of blooms and flowering trees, a barren ravine coated in vines and blossoms until it was worthy of being called a sunken garden.
The only reason the other Briars didn’t move in and take this place for themselves was the shadow of the Nomeolvides legacy, their fear that anywhere the women had touched was a place men disappeared.
“She’s right,” Estrella said. “He wouldn’t be here if he had a choice.”
“Maybe Reid’s not as stupid as he looks,” Gloria said. “You know what Marjorie used to say. When they’re about to run you out of town…”
“Get in front of the crowd and make it look like the parade,” Calla said.
Reid Briar meant to turn a punishment into an opportunity.
The four of them put everything back, smoothing the duvet, hanging the clothes up, sliding the papers into the suitcase pocket. They slipped back down the stairs and into their shoes.
Azalea and Fel were still keeping Reid’s glass full. Estrella and her other three cousins stopped in the doorway so fast they bumped into one another, skirts brushing.
Reid, his eyes reddened from the sherry that did not taste like sherry, looked up. His gaze caught Fel’s.
“I thought it was all girls here,” he said.
Fel stilled.
“They’re not girls, Reid,” Bay said, “they’re women. And he’s theirs.”
“Who is he?” Reid asked, as though the boy he was looking at could not hear him.
“He’s our brother,” Azalea said. And it felt true, like the land had given them a brother when they had never had one.
“He’s our cousin,” Gloria said at the same moment. And this too felt true, even though they had never had boy cousins, either.
The words spoken at the same time made Gloria and Azalea whip their heads toward each other.
Reid might not have known they did not have brothers or boy cousins, but they had wavered, and now he watched them all.
Fel looked at Estrella. The terror in his face was as clear as a spoken question. Please don’t tell him. Please don’t tell this stranger what little you know and how I know even less.
“He’s with me,” Estrella said. Not only because she had been the one to find him. Not even because her cousins blamed her little wooden horses for the appearance of this strange boy. But because this was an explanation for their nervousness that Reid might believe. That what they were hiding was how a boy none of them were married to lived with them. “He goes with me.”
Reid looked from each of their faces to the next.
“Why didn’t you just say that?” he asked. “There’s no rule against that. That’s allowed.”
The tension came into Bay’s jaw so fast Estrella could see it. She felt it in her own bones, the muscles around her mouth hardening.
Azalea looked at the rest of the cousins, one eyebrow lifting, her open-mouth smile showing how she was too disbelieving to be angry yet.
Under Reid’s friendly permission was the rough ground of what he wanted them all to understand. He was here now, so he was the one who would say what was allowed.
Dalia leaned into Estrella. “I guess we get to keep him.”
A breath fell from Estrella. Dalia was right. Now that Estrella had claimed Fel as theirs, they couldn’t put him in this house, no matter what Bay had offered.
“Fel or Reid?” Calla asked.