“Bay? The safe choice?” A bitter laugh built in Estrella’s throat. Maybe they had thought Bay was safe in some ways, but not this way, not in the sharp language of their family. “What do you think our mothers would say if any of us tried to be with her? If we hadn’t all stalemated each other by loving her at the same time? They’ve only let this go on because she can’t get us pregnant. Try kissing Bay in front of them, see what they say. See what they say when it’s out in the open.”
Dalia’s flinch was so deep Estrella felt her own body mirroring it.
“Oh,” Estrella said.
Bay wanted Dalia. Dalia wanted her in a way that ran deeper than the love passed back and forth between five cousins.
And they had acted on it, a dark-haired girl kissing a pale, freckled one.
“You’re with her,” Estrella said.
“That’s not the point.”
“But you are.”
“I love her,” Dalia said, the words quiet, given through the small space between her lips.
“We all loved her.”
“She thinks the Briars don’t want her because there’s something wrong with her,” Dalia said. “She thinks it’s the same reason her mother left her with Marjorie. Did you even know that?”
The center of Estrella’s heart pinched, a hard knot for Bay. But the instinct to defend herself washed over it, so before she could stop herself she said, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“We never bothered to know her,” Dalia said.
“She didn’t want to talk about her mother. Or the Briars. She told us that.”
“No, she didn’t talk about them because we didn’t give her space to. We let her tell us she didn’t want to talk about any of it and we left it at that, because we didn’t really want to hear about it.”
“Why would we want to make her talk about it?” Estrella asked. “Why would we make her want to talk about anything that hurts her?”
“Because that’s what people need sometimes.” For a few words, Dalia yelled, before drawing her voice back down. “And if you love them, you let them. You wait until they’re ready. You give them the room to talk about it. But we didn’t. We didn’t want to see that there was pain in her. We just wanted what she was to us. How she entertained us. We wanted her charm, not her broken places. We didn’t want to see that there was anything broken in her.”
“That’s supposed to impress me?” Estrella asked. “That you think she’s broken.”
“Everyone’s broken. The only difference is how.”
Without wanting to, Estrella breathed in Dalia’s words. They stung like winter air.
“I love her for who she is, not who she was to all of us,” Dalia said. “We thought everything about her was some costume, some kind of show, but she is a person. She doesn’t exist for us to look at. She wasn’t just there so we could admire her. She’s her own person. We never left any room for that. And that’s my fault as much as yours, or Gloria’s, or Azalea’s, or Calla’s. We all did it. I did it. We made her ours, and we didn’t leave any space for her to decide for herself. We gave her no room to be anything other than what we made her.”
Each word clung to Estrella’s skin like wet leaves, the stems scratching and prickling.
Dalia was right. The cousins had diminished Bay, reduced her to what she was to them. Even tonight, Estrella had done it. She had contrasted the satin trousers and French braid with the suspenders and felt hat. She had never considered the possibility that both were fully Bay, or that maybe neither was, or that both were but so were other possibilities Estrella and her cousins could not guess, because Bay had yet to live them.
“We acted like she was ours,” Dalia said. “And she was never ours.”
Estrella shook her head, not because this was untrue, because it was a truth wider than Dalia realized. Nothing was theirs. Not this house. Not their dresses, bought on Marjorie’s account at the shop in town.
Not La Pradera. It was always its own, vicious and protective.
The only thing that was theirs was the legacy passed down to them, the fear that they would ruin anyone they loved. And now came this new guilt, breaking through like starflowers between forget-me-not vines. Estrella hadn’t known Bay. Maybe none of them had. And if Dalia was right, and Estrella hadn’t learned Bay in all this time, how could she ever know the odd boy La Pradera had given them?
“She never belonged to any of us,” Dalia said. “She was always her own and we never let her be her own.”
All of it rushed through Estrella. La Pradera in the hands of a Briar who had not lived here, had not grown to love this land and these gardens. Bay dying to all of them and then coming back to life. The lies Dalia had told, the tears she had forced, to both kill Bay and save her.
Fel’s mouth on Estrella’s.
The way he kissed her was soft, like he was asking permission, but his lips were almost as rough as his fingertips.
Her mother had been wrong. Men like Reid were not cotton candy. It was girls with hearts that could not be kept from falling in love, and anyone unlucky enough to be loved by them.
They all dissolved like spun sugar in water.
Estrella let everything awful and true shove her out of the room.
Dalia called after her, her name said like she was a child to be reasoned with.
But Estrella let all those things chase her down the stairs, out of the stone house, through the gardens where dahlias and calla lilies rose up around her like a flowering forest.
The lawns and paths flew under her feet, but still, she ran, until the gardens thinned and the land passed from tended to wild.
When she was small, Estrella worried that the mere act of crossing La Pradera’s borders would kill her. When Gloria and Dalia had first lured their younger cousins out at night, the younger ones had winced at the act of setting their feet against the main road without their mothers’ blessing.
But in the years after, Estrella understood the hold La Pradera had on her and her family. It was intricate, and complicated. They could sneak into town to buy the deep brown and cognac-colored ribbons their grandmothers thought young girls should not wear. They just couldn’t run.
They couldn’t leave La Pradera with the intention of leaving for good. Like the distance between the rustle of soft wind and the warning of a coming storm, La Pradera sensed the difference between daughters sneaking out at night and girls fleeing its hold.
The land always knew.
Estrella didn’t care. She was breaking free of this before it wore her into dust. It could kill her if it wanted. By the time it took hold of her, she would be too far for it to drag her back.
Her mother, in refusing to name her for a flower, had thought she was doing her a kindness. Named Rosa herself, her mother had grown up believing she was nothing but black magic petals and secret garden roses, and had not wanted the same for her daughter.
Her mother had even hoped that by giving her a name that was not a flower, she would free her from the weight of the Nomeolvides gift and curse, and the hold of La Pradera.
Estrella would never know.
Unless she ran.
The sky rushed by above her, like the night was water sweeping the stars along its current. The wild grass rose to her ankles and then to her knees by the time she had to stop. Each breath turned wet and rasping.