Estrella tore open a bag of cotton candy. She would wait until Bay started talking. She twirled off a piece of spun sugar, and then handed the cotton candy to Fel. She hoped he’d join her, both of them giving off the sense that they had all night. They would stay until the silence wore Bay down.
Fel did the same thing she’d done, pulling away a scrap, and then passed it to Bay. He looked at the fluff sticking to his fingers. He seemed unsure if it was candy or fabric, and for a minute she wondered if he saw it like she had the first time her mother bought it for her, like blush-colored clouds whirled onto a paper cone.
Most of the time, Fel’s wonder made her protective. It made her slow and careful with him. But now it frustrated her. Right now, everything frustrated her.
“You eat it, Fel,” she said. “You just put it in your mouth.”
He did it, his eyes on her as he swallowed it. That startled look made her a little guilty, but she caught the glint of something else. His interest maybe. His amusement at her getting this worked up over spun sugar.
Bay tore off a piece of cotton candy but didn’t eat it. She set the bag between the three of them, the puff leaning to one side on the rusted landing.
Bay. Alive. Hair dyed auburn, cut short, the longest pieces now free from her hat and brushing her cheekbones. Bay had forgone her satin coats in favor of slacks and collared shirts that made her the same as a hundred men.
Whatever thrill Estrella felt to see her turned damp and heavy. She should have thrown her arms around her, shrieked with the joy of knowing her heart and her cousins’ hearts had not killed her.
But the only words in her were bitter.
“Nice haircut,” she said.
“Thank you.” Bay took off her hat and ran a hand through her cropped hair. “I miss the braid a little, to tell you the truth. This keeps getting in my face. But I don’t miss being called Miss Briar, I’ll tell you that.”
A faint laugh turned in Estrella’s throat, but she didn’t let it become sound. In all the time Estrella had watched her, Bay had never been bothered either by being called a girl or a boy. But that word, Miss, engraved on invitations or written in calligraphy on envelopes, had made Bay shudder. To Bay, Miss spoke of what the rest of the Briars would expect her to be. A proper young woman in neutral, pearled pumps, diamond drop earrings, a knee-length lace dress.
The kind of woman everyone except Marjorie expected her to be.
“Which part?” Estrella asked. “Just the miss or the Briar, too?”
“Both,” Bay said.
“What do we call you?” Fel asked.
It was such a genuine question, his voice so open, that it made Estrella cross her arms just to remind Bay she was not forgiven.
“On the street, don’t call me anything.” Bay’s eyes flashed from the fire escape landing to the wet ground below. “Down there, you don’t know me. But right now, up here, call me Bay. I’m the same girl.”
The word girl prickled against the back of Estrella’s neck, her skin hot with the rush of being near Bay. This version of Bay had abandoned her French braid. She wore the understated colors of men’s clothes. She was beautiful either way, and it was a sharp, stinging reminder of what Estrella and her cousins all shared.
“You’re not the same,” Estrella said. “You let us think you were dead. The Bay I knew would never do that.”
“I know,” Bay said. “But I had reasons, Estrella. I would never do this to your family if I didn’t have a good reason.”
“Everyone is mourning you,” Estrella said. “Do you understand that?”
“I’m sorry,” Bay said, her head down, voice low, looking so guilty that Estrella almost declared her forgiven. “But this is important. I can’t explain it right now, but I have to do this.”
“What’s important enough to let everyone think you’re dead?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You did this for something that doesn’t matter?”
The cotton candy bag listed a little further. Fel righted it, but it leaned again. And that small defeat, the forlorn puff in a crumpled bag, seemed to open Bay.
Bay sighed, and then she spoke. She told them how she had known Reid wanted more than he was saying. How he had reminded her that she was no Briar heir, and that it was only by Reid’s gracious generosity that he let Bay stay. How he had tried to threaten her with the fate of the Nomeolvides women, how with the twist of the right rumor, they would be hunted as witches.
How about you help me, or I force them off this land and they die?
Estrella shivered, wondering how much Reid knew about La Pradera’s hold on them, if he had heard any stories of runaway girls coughing up pollen until the breath left them.
“But La Pradera is yours,” Estrella said, hoping Bay would refute everything Calla had said. The problem with Marjorie’s will. The mistakes the lawyers had made. The words—fee tail, devise—that Estrella still did not understand. “Marjorie left it to you.”
“It’s not that simple,” Bay said. “But I’m not giving up. That’s why I’m here. I needed Reid to stop watching me.”
“What will you do while he’s not watching you?” Fel asked.
Bay offered her surest smile. “Gather ammunition.”
Estrella scooted a little closer. “What do you have?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Before Estrella’s shoulders slumped, Bay held up a hand.
“I’m working on it,” she said. “The Briars have secrets. Everybody does.”
“You know Reid’s, don’t you?” Estrella asked.
Bay shook her head. “Not big enough. I need more. And I’ll find it.”
Estrella watched the flickering of Bay’s eyes, even brighter with her hair dyed dark. Next to Fel, with his skin the color of wet brush, his eyes as deep brown as the rusted fire escape’s metal, Bay’s face looked even paler, her freckles as delicate as spilled cinnamon. They were both a kind of family to her, one she and her cousins had grown up next to, the other found in her family’s garden and taken into their home like a lost son.
She did not know what to do with them now, the boy she feared for the beautiful and frightening things he might mean, and the love she and her cousins shared. Even though Bay had told all these lies, even though her mother warned her that Fel was a boy who did not sleep, that protectiveness still lit up inside her, for both of them.
“How has no one recognized you by now?” Estrella almost whispered it. “People here knew Marjorie. And they know you.”
“I’m out of my Bay Briar costume,” Bay said, gesturing to her haircut, her suspenders, her plain polished shoes, the hat she’d set on the landing. “You’d be amazed how no one looks past that. Most of the time, people don’t look past what they think they know.”
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.
Bay climbed up three more flights of the fire escape and then disappeared onto the roof.
Estrella leaned against a stretch of brick and shut her eyes, the feeling of Bay’s mouth left on her forehead. Estrella had never felt more like Bay’s little sister. Dalia was her beautiful cousin, fire-eyed and straight-backed, her hair sweeping behind her like a cape, and Estrella was still more girl than woman.
When she opened her eyes, Fel was holding out the little box of marzipan fruit to her.
She shook her head and gave him as much of a smile as she had. She felt how forced it must have looked on her closed lips. But she didn’t want to hold a soft round of marzipan on her tongue.
She wanted to rip things apart with her teeth.