Estrella studied Bay.
People so often knew each other by the ways they were not the same. It was why Estrella and her cousins, with their skin in close though not matching shades of brown, all looked alike to La Pradera’s guests. It was why no one recognized this dark-haired stranger as a Briar. Without her pale French braid, her flourishing gestures, her outfits that were a few ruched seams away from belonging in Marie Antoinette’s court, Bay was skimmed over as some unremarkable young man.
“Why take the risk?” Estrella asked. “You could go anywhere.”
“I’ve got to pay for everything somehow.” Her eyes flicked to the hotel windows. “The easiest way is to stay here.”
“How?” Estrella asked.
Bay’s smile held a wince. “You do know why Marjorie’s father was exiled to La Pradera, don’t you?”
Estrella shook her head. That was one story Marjorie had never told, how she and her father had come to live in the place Briar failures were sent. If the grandmothers knew, and Estrella was sure they did, they never let it slip. At least not in front of her and her cousins.
“Gambling debt,” Bay said. “Why do you think my grandmother taught me all those card games?”
“So you could run up your own gambling debt?” Estrella asked.
“No,” Bay said. “So I’d have what she called a moderate relationship with gambling. She wanted me to take hold of it instead of it getting me one day like it got her father. It’s the same reason she taught me the right way to drink a glass of wine when I was sixteen, so I wouldn’t be a drunk when I was forty.”
Estrella remembered the rising laughs from Marjorie’s guests when young Bay beat them at cards. All of them roared over the felt table and the winning hand so much they didn’t mind losing their money to eight-, or ten-, or thirteen-year-old Bay.
“You’re gambling to cover your room every night?” Estrella asked.
“It’s not gambling if you know you’ll win,” Bay said, and now she couldn’t help her grin.
Estrella cringed.
“I’m not playing like everyone else,” Bay said. “They’re not even my chips. I’m there to drive up the bets. That’s what I do. Every table I’m at is a high-stakes table when I’m done with it. None of the men down there want to get shown up by a kid, so they all raise until I fold. And you should see how satisfied they are when I do. Even if they lose, they feel like they’ve won. The house makes more, and the dealers give me a cut at the end of the night.”
“And the dealers don’t know who you are?” Estrella asked.
“They didn’t even recognize me until I started talking about my grandmother,” Bay said. “But sure, of course they do now. I know them the same way my grandmother knew their fathers.”
It was so perfect Estrella couldn’t help laughing.
But the shimmer of her own laugh wore off, tarnished by remembering every awful moment since Bay had gone.
“How could you risk us like this?” Estrella asked. “With you gone, did you even think what would happen if Reid threw us off the land?”
“He would never do that in a million years and you know it.”
Estrella’s lips stilled, the truth leaving no room for her objections.
Reid wanted to turn La Pradera into a place that made so much money, he could buy his way back from the damage done with a lit candelabra.
Without the Nomeolvides women, the gardens would go feral, flowers withering or overgrowing their beds. Even under the most devoted hands Reid could hire, the gardens would be a weak imitation of what the Nomeolvides women had made them, and he would have to pay more to keep it up than the gardens would ever make him.
“And you know me,” Bay said. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“I thought I knew you,” Estrella said. “But you used us.” She didn’t understand how awful it was until she said it. Bay had taken the legacy of disappearing loves to lay out her path away from La Pradera.
And Dalia. Sobbing, screaming Dalia. Whatever trick of the light Bay had used to convince Dalia she was turning to air and sky had worked so well, Dalia carried the memory up and down the halls at night. Each night, Estrella woke up in the bed she was sharing with Dalia to find her cousin’s side cold. Every few minutes, Dalia’s shadow broke the seam of light at the bottom of the door.
“You used Dalia,” Estrella said. “How did you even make her believe that?”
Bay may have had the hard-jawed resolve, the faked arrogance, to drive up bets at the card tables. But she didn’t have the blank expression to hide what she knew. Her guilt was so pained and clear even Fel caught it. He turned to Estrella, waiting for her to understand.
“Dalia,” Estrella said, the idea so new she laughed as she said the name. “Dalia knows.”
“Don’t blame her,” Bay said. “I begged her to help me.”
“We all would have helped you,” Estrella said. “All you had to do was ask.”
“I didn’t want you all to have to lie,” Bay said.
Even though Estrella believed it, she found the heart of why Bay had asked Dalia. It was clear in the perfect contrast between the neat, pale braid Bay had worn for years, and Dalia’s hair, loose and half-curly. It was in Dalia’s cruel laugh and kind hands. It was in the forbidden lingerie showing at her neckline in ribbons of purple or deep red.
Estrella wanted to say Dalia’s name just to check again, just to see the slight hope in Bay’s face, the soft lift of her eyebrows, the parting of her lips.
The bond held tight between Estrella and her cousins had not just been their adoration of Bay. It had been that Bay seemed to love none of them back, or at least that she loved each of them only a little, and all the same.
But Bay was in love with Dalia.
Bay still hadn’t eaten the scrap of cotton candy. It was dissolving on her fingers, turning to wet, pink sugar.
Voices filled the alley below, and the warm, bitter smell of cigar smoke rose up through the grated landing. Bay eyed the space underneath them, not afraid but anxious, as though these might be men she’d spurred on at the card tables.
“I promise you,” Bay said, putting her hat back on, “as soon as I get what I need to keep you and your family safe, I will come back.”
Estrella didn’t need that promise. Of course Bay would come back. Bay would come back not just to the place Marjorie had made her own. Not just to the Nomeolvides women who had brought Bay back to life after Marjorie’s death.
She would come back for the Nomeolvides girl she loved.
Bay nodded a farewell greeting at Fel, then set her hand in Estrella’s hair and kissed her on the forehead.
In the moment of Bay’s lips touching her hairline, Estrella expected the same flutter as when she’d kissed Bay years ago, her heart like a cabbage moth’s wings. But this was a kiss Bay might give her own cousin, and it landed on Estrella’s skin as dull as an ache.