They decided they would scare him off, this man who did not know these gardens. In the cupboards of the Briar house, Azalea grew green leaves that crowded the space between plates and bowls. Gloria’s vines clung to the inner walls, dense as mulch. Dalia’s fingers left flowers in the colors of fall trees, spilling off bookshelves and rising out of Reid’s dresser drawers. Calla crowded his marble sink and enamel bathtub with lilies, their whirls of white shielding yellow centers.
They hid flowers in their mouths, parting their lips when Reid passed and showing the petals like white or blue tongues. When he turned his back, Estrella planted starflowers in his food. Pink blossoms poked up between the ice cubes in his drinks. White blooms dotted a plate of dry-sherry scrambled eggs. They drew vines up through the floor of his bedroom. The starflower stems, fuzzy and purple, came in so fast and thick they buckled the aged wood.
But he drank the coffee, ate the eggs. From their hiding places in the hall, Estrella and her cousins saw him crouch to the split floorboards, pinching stems between his fingers and shaking his head as though witnessing a wonder. When they flashed the flowers hidden under their tongues, he said, “Extraordinary,” with the half-breathed reverence of seeing a saint’s relic.
They had not frightened him.
They had impressed him. Each flower that grew where it did not belong, each petal flashed between their teeth, deepened his interest.
Marjorie had loved seeing princes and ambassadors stride onto La Pradera, sure that no country gardens could match their own walled grounds. She loved watching them struck silent by the sunken garden opening in front of them, a ravine of flowering color and rich green.
Now that wonder worked against Estrella and her cousins.
That night, Estrella flopped down onto Azalea’s bed. “Now what?”
“We try something else,” Gloria said.
Azalea sat at her mirror, brushing pins out of her hair. “Like what?”
“Can we send him back to whatever corner of the world the Briars threw him out of?” Dalia said.
Calla’s shape appeared in the doorway, outlined by the hall’s light. “That might be harder than we thought.”
Estrella sat up. Gloria, Azalea, and Dalia shifted toward the door.
“We might have a legal problem.” Calla sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, Bay might.”
“What are you talking about?” Azalea asked.
Calla sighed. “Marjorie’s will.”
“Marjorie left La Pradera to Bay,” Estrella said.
“It might not have been hers to leave to anyone,” Calla said.
“How do you know that?” Azalea said.
“I read the deed.”
“When?”
Calla shrugged. “When Reid wasn’t looking.”
She gave them the words, assuming they would recognize them. Fee tail. Devise. Line of succession. Some Estrella caught. Others slipped from her hands. She felt herself settling between her cousins. She was not Azalea, who was too bored to listen and so skipped to being outraged. Nor was she Gloria, her lips pressed together in a way that meant she registered all this a little faster than the rest of them.
But Estrella understood enough for her worry to gather with her cousins’. It was so thick in the air they were breathing it.
“If it’s a legal problem, why can’t Bay go to court?” Dalia asked.
“Yeah.” Azalea nodded into the mirror. “If we can’t get him out of here, a judge can.”
“It’s not just that,” Gloria said, and that look, that apprehension over the things she understood that they did not, drew their faces toward her like trumpet flowers finding the moon. “It’s that Reid and the rest of the Briars decided she’s not one of them.”
“But she is,” Estrella said. “It’s her last name, too. Her blood.”
“The Briars consider her illegitimate,” Gloria said. “Because she was conceived in an adulterous union.”
“Stop it.” Dalia rubbed her temples. “You sound like a priest.”
“Not a priest,” Calla said. “That’s exactly what the Briars would say. They’ve probably already said it.”
“But she was raised by Marjorie.” Azalea held up a hand. “Marjorie’s as much a Briar as any of them.”
“And Marjorie paid the taxes on this place when they were about five minutes from losing it,” Dalia said.
“It doesn’t matter what’s true,” Gloria said. “It matters what the Briars think. If Bay fights this, they will ruin her. They’ll not only throw her out of here. They’ll cut her off. And if she isn’t afraid of that, she’s afraid of them making her life miserable. I would be. They could tell any lie they want about her and everyone would believe it, because they’re the Briars. They make things true.”
“They would do that to their own family?” Estrella asked.
“Did you hear anything she just said?” Calla asked. “They don’t think she’s family. If they did, she wouldn’t be here alone.”
“She’s not alone,” Dalia said. “She has us.”
Azalea’s eyes found each of theirs in the mirror. “So can we kill him?”
“Anyone falling for him?” Gloria asked. “That’d be one way to do it.”
Azalea looked at them one by one. “Well?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at each of them. “Any stirrings of love?”
Their shared laugh was small, but it was clean and rare enough that it rang. In the days since Reid had come to La Pradera, they had not heard this laugh, the sounds of their voices threading together like they were singing.
It tasted sweeter in their mouths for being a shared joke about the thing they feared most. The way the force and poison of a Nomeolvides woman’s heart was enough to make her lover vanish. How their love was a kind of killing frost.
Another shape cut through the light in the doorway. Not Calla, who was still swinging her legs off the edge of the bed.
Bay.
Estrella and her cousins shuddered, as though they had drawn her here by holding her name between them.
“I thought you should know,” Bay said. “Reid and I are hosting a ball.”
Estrella felt all their hearts rising to the possibility of what this meant. It was as sudden as the smell of lilacs in March. Maybe Bay had broken through the worry that she could never follow after Marjorie Briar. Maybe she was ready to hold her own parties where they sold rich men seeds and brought new health into town shops.
But Bay’s smile was pinched. The name Reid twisted her lips like the bite of a fruit rind.
This was not a summer party to sell seeds. This was not some evening glowing with fairy lights, meant to stir the town’s love for this odd, flowering place.
This was a thing Reid had demanded. He had forced Bay into it.
Marjorie had died, and ever since, the line of Bay’s posture had slumped a little, even as she laughed. Reid would not wait for her to rise from the low valley of Marjorie being gone.
The Nomeolvides mothers and grandmothers had fed and cared for Bay for months, and a little at a time, sureness had straightened Bay’s shoulders.
Now it was falling away like a dusting of snow.