Fel’s skin grew warmer as he slept. Estrella’s veins had felt coiled, taut as cords, but the heat off his body made them give. The muscle around her lungs eased. She set her palms against his back. The contours of his scars crossed her hands, his skin as warm as the ground late in the afternoon. She wondered if it was his dreams that did this, blazing inside him like embers.
She traced her fingers along his scars. They branched over his back. He looked like ground that had been tilled too hard, rock that had been storm-weathered.
He had seemed so much more like some unnamed saint than a boy she could ever touch. He had seemed unknowable because she had assumed there was nothing more to know than his nightmares and the praying reverence he shared with the grandmothers.
But there were broken places in him, too.
She saw him carrying the shame of this, his grasping at remembering what had happened. She wanted to tell him she felt nothing about these scars but hate for whoever had given them to him. The time he had once been alive, the time signaled by the clothes she’d found him in, was one Estrella thought of as a world that would punish boys like him for small, easy things. If he’d been on the crew of a ship, he could’ve gotten them from talking back.
But she didn’t know how to tell him this without sounding like she was calling the time he’d lived in backward. So instead she kissed the line of each one she could find in the dark, the veins of scarring smooth under her lips.
Light spilled onto the windowsill. It crawled across the ceiling, casting a veil of gold over the starflowers she thought she’d imagined the night before. The deep blue of the borraja lightened and warmed, the vines glowing like they were made of sun.
Estrella slipped out of this bed she had grown up in and down the hall, as though she could pretend she had nothing to do with the meadow covering the rafters. She acted as if it was not hers, or at least no more hers than his.
Dalia’s dress for Reid’s ball hung from the curtain rod, the skirt brushing the floor. Dawn filled the window, and the color of the dress lit up coral. The skirt, streaked with brushstrokes of black, looked like a wild poppy.
Estrella slid into bed next to Dalia.
She could hate Dalia when they were both awake. But asleep, she was the same Dalia who’d smuggled them the dark lingerie and deep perfume their mothers thought they were too young for. She was the Dalia who’d convinced rich men to buy their grandmothers gifts, whispering that if they gave las brujas viejas offerings they would bring luck back to their own estates. The Dalia who had the same craving for saladitos, her mother’s salted plums dusted with anise and chili, every month when she bled.
Estrella combed her fingers through her cousin’s hair, kissing her temple like she was a favorite doll.
Dalia groaned softly. “You’re welcome.”
“For what?” Estrella whispered.
“Lying for you,” Dalia said, still half-asleep. “She’ll wring your neck like a chicken, remember?”
Estrella tried not to laugh. Either Dalia had been listening in, or her mother had tossed the threat around like confetti.
The sun rose past the window, and the hallway outside turned to chiffon and satin. Yellow and pink trailed out of her cousins’ hands. Lilac and green hung from curtain rods.
Estrella took in perfumed air in slow, even breaths. La Pradera’s sudden hold, its pulling her back, had left her tired and dragging.
Dalia brushed color onto her cheeks while she was still lying in bed. She outlined her eyes in the blue of dark water. Then she pulled Estrella out of bed, shoving her dress at her.
Estrella gave in to knowing she would not tell. She would not break open Dalia’s secrets and Bay’s, not even for her other cousins.
“I don’t want to do this,” Estrella said.
“None of us do.” Dalia put lipstick on her, a pink-red that stood bright near the blue of her dress. “But now you know what happens to any of us if Reid throws us out, so we have to.” Dalia brushed a stray eyelash off Estrella’s cheek. “Just do what he asked and be done. Trust me, you don’t want to owe him anything.”
“No,” Estrella said. “I didn’t mean that.” She looked toward the door. “I mean I don’t want to lie to them.”
Dalia fastened the last hook-and-eye clasp on her dress. “Then don’t say anything.”
Estrella clipped on the necklace that had once belonged to her father’s mother. Estrella had never met either one of them, her father or his mother, but she knew he had given Rosa Nomeolvides this necklace. Years later, long after he had left both her and La Pradera, Estrella’s mother had caught her holding it as gently as a feather.
Her mother had said she could keep it, shrugging as though loaning a hairpin.
There were two kinds of Nomeolvides hearts, ones broken by the vanishings, and ones who counted themselves lucky to have seen the back of their lovers as they left.
Estrella and her cousins climbed the stone steps to the ballroom. The air glittered with white lights. The sound of string instruments—violins, a cello, a harp—wafted out the French doors.
All five cousins halted at the threshold.
Marjorie’s balls had always turned La Pradera into a land as beautiful and magical as a fairy tale. The acres of flower beds, the swirls of hedges, the gardens dense with colorful bulbs all seemed like a kingdom that held an infinite number of enchanting stories. In the roses, visitors saw as many possibilities for love as there were petals on the blossoms. They looked into the fountains like they held a thousand wishes. The first bloom of closed hyacinths looked like painted Easter eggs hidden in the green.
But now there were no children in their Sunday clothes, spinning under the flowering trees. No mothers in straight black dresses, because the dresses they wore to funerals were the nicest ones they owned. No young men wearing the oddest suits they could find at the secondhand shops, and their girlfriends who’d sewn their own tulle skirts.
Instead of a party sprinkled with rich men and their wives, this was all rich men and their wives. They gleamed like the mirrored hallways flanking the ballroom.
The men had kept to crisp black and white, the women all polished color. A rich man’s daughter wore a skirt that looked like the endless ruffles of a white peony. A woman Estrella’s mother’s age stood in a column of satin striped like a rare orchid. A laughing wife had on a yellow-and-red skirt with curled edges like tulip petals.
“What is all this?” Azalea asked.
The cousins turned to her, wondering if they had all spoken the same words.
The music, the lights, the smell of lavender and sugared liqueur. Those wisps of Marjorie’s parties were here, making the rest seem even odder, close but off. It had that same not-quite-right feeling of dreams, the kind where Calla’s and Azalea’s rooms were swapped, or her mother had green eyes, or Gloria’s grandmother had vines for hair.
All those diamond earrings were too hard against the pink and white lily magnolias. The green of emerald rings looked cold against the jacarandas’ leaves. The pins on the men’s silk ties did not belong with the mimosa and lilac trees, with their flowers like soft candies.
“Let’s get this over with.” Calla charged into the ballroom. She passed under the swaths of bright silk draping the ceiling, pinned at the corners of the room and then gathered at the chandelier.
Estrella passed a boy who stood out more because of his stance than his clothes, or his hair, or even how his skin was the same brown as her grandmother’s. He did not stand straight and tall like the men in their black-and-white clothes.
He watched the polished floor like he was looking for the ground underneath it.
She did not register him as Fel until she caught his reflection in a gilt-framed mirror. He wore the black pants, dark green shirt, and black vest Reid had decided would make him blend in with the guests without being mistaken for one.
The feeling of touching him came back to her. She tried to stop the memory from spinning forward, but it got away from her, like the wind taking a spray of leaves.
His fingers brushed hers, an echo of the night before. It was so slight she couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose.
This time, he did not apologize.
He leaned down to her, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel the warmth on her neck.
“Don’t do that again,” he said.
She tilted her head so he had to look at her. His breath and hers met, heating the space between their lips.
“Don’t do what again?” She let the challenge sharpen her voice.
Until now, she had protected him like he was as young as Calla and only half as smart. She had handled him more carefully than her grandmother and her cousins’ grandmothers. But men could not tell her family what to do. Not the ones in town who asked Azalea didn’t she know how pretty she was, or who told Gloria to smile for them. Not the wealthy men they tricked into buying seeds and bulbs as though they were made of gold. Not even this boy who might mean so many things that they both loved him and feared him.
Estrella could demand his silence about the things Bay had told them on the fire escape. She could threaten him into staying quiet about what only he and Dalia knew, that she had tried to run, and La Pradera had taken rough hold of her for it. She could leave him in the paling blue before dawn.
Men and boys had no claim on their secrets or their bodies. La Pradera was a world in which women did not listen to men just because they were men.
But in making him look at her, she saw it, how the hard shine on his eyes was not the force of him trying to rule her.
It was fear. Worry flickered over his eyes like light.
“Don’t run,” he said. “If that’s what the gardens do if you run, then don’t run.”
The feeling of holding on to him, her unfiled nails cutting into his shoulder, rose from last night. They turned from dreams to things real enough that they lived in her fingers, true as the possibility of flowers.
“I’ll look for you,” he said. “And your family will look for you. But don’t make them see you like that. They love you and it will break them.”
The certainty in his voice buckled, and she heard the words he left in silence. How her lips had been stained red with pollen and her own blood.
“Please,” he said.
She felt his stare on her skin. It was a ribbon of water, tracing along each bead of her necklace. It was such bright contrast to the heat of his fingertips that she looked away first.
Letting her gaze fall gave Reid the chance to catch her eyes. He stood outside the French doors and nodded to her, and her stomach tightened even more than it had under the cinch of the dress.
Her repayment for the torched car.
She held to the possibility that Bay would get together enough Briar secrets to drive him off the land. But until she did, Estrella had to bring Reid the weighted-down obedience of a girl mourning Bay.
“Young lady.” Reid’s voice rushed through the doors and into the ballroom, loud enough that everyone turned their faces toward him.
He had warned her he would do this, call her something other than her name.
But the words sounded too old for Reid’s voice. Young lady. Those were words for men twice his age.
Estrella had thought she had gotten so much for so little, Reid forgiving his car turned to ash for nothing but a demure smile and a few flowers. Now, though, with Reid calling her by something other than her name, this seemed strange, wrong, like he had crossed the threshold of her room. She hadn’t expected it to feel like a kind of invasion.
Reid stretched a hand into the sugar- and champagne-scented air, and she understood. He had wanted to give himself the air of a showman or circus ringleader. The words matched the gesture of his arm, his pale wrist showing at the sleeve of his fine suit as he swept his hand from the doors toward an open lawn.
“Come here,” Reid said, more voices going quiet with each word, “and make me an ocean.”
This was how she would pay him back. How she would make Reid forget any thoughts of forcing them off La Pradera. He would demand something so impossible it drew gasps from the rich men and women whose steps brought up the smell of lemon and wax and shoe polish. When Reid had first told her what he wanted, it had sounded so easy and small. But now he summoned her with words he might call any of her cousins.
This way, he could put them all on display at once.