Her mother did not try to hold her as she cried into the sheets Fel had slept in. Her mother did not try to stroke her hair or shush her with a soft voice. Instead, she soaked a cloth in rosewater and with rough, quick strokes she cleared the trails of salt and the indigo dried on Estrella’s cheeks. She handed Estrella a small cup and told her to swallow it down. The alcohol burned the back of her throat, then left the taste of anise and honey.
The sting of the liquor faded, and Estrella fell into the open well of sleep.
“Luisa,” her mother said from the doorway.
Estrella sat up, half-asleep, wondering if, for a moment, her mother had forgotten her name.
“The one I loved most wasn’t your father,” her mother said, her shape a silhouette in the hall’s light. “We loved each other the way friends do, your father and I. But I loved someone else in a very different way. Her name was Luisa.”
To another daughter, it might have stung, the revelation that her father was some lesser love to her mother.
But this one name shimmered with the possibility that her mother understood the hearts of Estrella and her cousins.
And right now it kept Estrella breathing.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“I sent her away,” her mother said. Even in the dark Estrella could make out the hardening of her face, bracing against the memory. She looked washed clean of excess color, her lips pale against the brown of her face and her deep eyes. “I told her I didn’t love her.”
Estrella sank back onto the bed. “I should’ve sent him away.”
“Where?” her mother asked. “This was the only home he had.”
Estrella’s eyes fell shut, and she breathed in the air through the window and the soft breath of her mother whispering, “Sleep.”
This was what turned Nomeolvides girls into women. Not their first times bleeding between their legs, but the first time their hearts broke. Estrella could feel hers inside her rib cage, a bird trapped in an attic.
She still wore her blue dress, limp and creased. The stains from the mushroom milk had turned a deep green. She slept in the bed that still smelled like him, the salt of his sweat and the scent of leaves in the gardens. She dreamed of setting her mouth against him, kissing the places where pale scars crossed his back like he was a map. She dreamed of the heat that lived just under his skin. And when she dreamed of him, she woke to starflowers spreading across the ceiling. The vines unfurled, wrapping around rafters and trailing down to the curtain rods. The purple blooms opened and showed their five blue petals.
She didn’t care who saw them. She didn’t care if they reminded her mother or her grandmother of girls driven from their houses for being witches. Estrella was more dangerous than any bruja. She had killed the boy she’d brought back. And this was a thing worse than loving him into disappearing in the first place.
She opened herself to her family’s worry. She hoped it would sharpen into scorn, because that was what she deserved. Not their concern. Not their sense that she should be looked after. Their contempt. Their blame.
Estrella deserved the name her mother had given her. She deserved how it made those blue flowers unpredictable, waiting at the edges of her dreams. She deserved the way it kept her a little distance from her cousins, making her a lesser Nomeolvides girl.
Later, her cousins filled the room, carrying haircombs, a clean dress, glasses of water, cups of tea. They came with hands ready to lead her into the shower and spin her into something living.
“We have to tell her,” Estrella said.
Her cousins stilled. She had said so little since shutting herself in this room that now her voice caught them.
“What?” Gloria asked.
“Bay.” Estrella slid to the edge of the bed, her feet brushing the floor. “We have to tell her to get away from us.”
“Why?” Calla and Azalea asked, a half second off from each other.
Estrella stood, the floor cool under her feet. “So we don’t kill her.”
As her cousins traded glances, the feeling of standing filled Estrella. The sense of her own weight and will came back into her body.
She could not save Fel. Nomeolvides girls had been the death of him twice. But she and her cousins could warn the girl they had grown up loving.
“We have to tell her to get away from us before we kill her,” Estrella said.
“No,” Dalia said. “We’re not telling her to do anything. We’re giving her time to do what she needs to do.”
“You convinced us all that we lost her,” Estrella said. “Do you really want to know what that felt like for us? Do you want it to happen for real so you can know?” The force of her own voice shocked through her. “Is that a chance you’ll take with her?”
“This was her home,” Azalea said. “Where do you want her to go?”
“Anywhere,” Estrella said. “Away from us. Away from Reid.”
“We are not Reid,” Dalia said.
“We’re worse,” Estrella said, “because she thinks we’re safe.”
Dalia’s flinch was so deep Estrella felt it.
“Our love is her death,” Estrella said, “and you know it.”
Dalia looked like she’d fallen into water, floating and weightless, like she’d lost the feeling of standing on this floor they’d all worn with years’ worth of steps.
“If we don’t want to lose her,” Estrella said, “we have to let her go.”
When Dalia nodded, it was slow, like she was answering through a dream. That nod, the giving in of her heart, pulled the rest of them with her.
The five of them streamed out of the stone house, passing the iris beds and rose trellises and the courtyard of blossoming trees. With prodding from Azalea and Calla, Dalia gave up the room number at the hotel. Fifth floor.
Bay opened the door on the first knock. By the shift in her expression, Estrella knew she’d expected just Dalia.
The five of them rushed into the cloth-papered room.
Estrella shut the door behind them. She parted her lips to say what she had brought her cousins here for, to beg Bay to flee from them.
Don’t think you’re safe from us just because you grew up with us.
Don’t die because we love you.
Don’t let our hearts kill you.
But the words trailed off Estrella’s tongue.
Paper covered every furniture surface in the hotel room. The desk. The night table. Even the bed, papers strewn over the unmade blankets.
Estrella drew closer, so slowly that Bay didn’t stop her.
They were all copies. Reproductions of old photographs. Not just black-and-white but tintype, daguerreotype. And grainy copies of articles from newspapers that looked more than a century old.
The newspaper clippings were single column, the kind that got buried deep in the pages. They used words Estrella recognized, in some vague way that only came to mind when she thought of them together, as geological. Overburden. Striation. Berm. Shear. But she didn’t know what any of them meant.
“Calla,” Azalea said, handing articles to her youngest cousin.
The photos showed the low contrast of a scene that was all rock, a hollow in the ground that looked like it had enormous, ringing steps up the sides. Some showed the rings of that hollow as unbroken levels, like stacked bowls.
Others showed a wide ribbon of earth running from one edge down into the deep center, like a spilled liquid.
“What is all this?” Gloria asked.
Before Bay could answer, Calla said, “It’s the sunken garden.”
Estrella looked at it again. She studied the shape in different photos, the edges, the faint smudges of scrub grass and trees beyond.
Calla was right. She’d recognized it even without the flowers and vines and trees.
Bay’s breath out sounded like the walls were sighing. “I told you I was still working it out. I just need time.”
“Bay,” Dalia said, her voice gentle as the brush of petals she’d grown herself.
The draft through the cracked window lifted the ends of Bay’s hair and then let them fall back to her forehead.
“Bay,” Dalia said again, laying her hand on the side of Bay’s face.
In the way she said Bay’s name, there was not pleading but urging, the assurance that to her and her cousins, Bay could tell these secrets.
“I was looking for something to get Reid to back off,” Bay said, eyes flashing to all of them. “Unfiled taxes. Something like that. But when I started looking, I found out something happened at La Pradera. A long time ago. Before it was La Pradera.”
“What happened?” Azalea asked.
Bay shook her head. “I don’t know everything yet.”
“Then tell us what you do know,” Gloria said, matching Dalia’s soft voice.
Bay straightened her shoulders, like this story was a thing she had to stand strong against. Whatever it was, she was buckling under the guilt of it.
“From what I could find, everyone thought it would be the best quarry in the country,” Bay said.
“What quarry?” Gloria asked.
“Where the sunken garden is,” Bay said. “It wasn’t just some canyon. It was a quarry.”
With those words, Estrella’s memories of the sunken garden twisted and sharpened. The layers of petals fell aside. The pond streamed away. The wind stripped the trees. There was nothing left to imagine but the jagged stone beneath everything.
“They all said the overburden—the dirt and everything else covering the minerals—was thinner than they’d ever seen,” Bay said. “That’s why they were stripping the ground, to get at what was underneath. But they ignored how much of it wasn’t structurally sound. There were faults and they knew it, and they didn’t do anything to account for it.”
Bay said each word like she was forcing them out. Estrella wanted to tell her this wasn’t her fault. She didn’t own this. She’d caught the dates on the newspapers, and this had been well over a hundred years ago.
“See the striations here.” She set a finger against a photograph, the bands in the sides of the pit. “They’re called benches. The part that drops down is the batter, the flat part’s the berm. I don’t know if you really understand how big this thing was. It’s hard to tell with all the trees and the flower beds now.”
She handed photographs to Calla and Gloria. “The benches are supposed to prevent rock falls from going all the way down the wall. That’s to try to make it less dangerous for the miners and prevent damage to everything. Not always in that order though.”
Estrella and Azalea clustered around Calla and Gloria, studying the striped benches.
“There are angles you’re supposed to do all this at. Shallower angles. Especially if you have any structural weakness within the rock.” Bay said each word with such pain, like she was watching it happen and could not reach out to stop it. “Faults. Shears. Anything like that. But they didn’t do what the surveyors told them to do. They paid them off and just did whatever they wanted.”
“They?” Gloria asked.
Bay’s shoulders rounded. “The Briars. My family.”
She gave them the photographs with the lines of the benches broken, that wide ribbon of earth. “They should have known, with walls that steep. They should’ve known this would happen.” She swallowed hard enough that Estrella could also see the knot of it in her throat. “When it broke, the landslide was like nothing they’d ever seen. Millions of cubic meters of dirt and rock. Everyone in town thought it was an earthquake.”
That was the band of earth. An avalanche, breaking the steps.
Gloria handed a photograph back to Bay. “Did everyone get out?”
Bay shut her eyes, shook her head, her jaw tight. “There’s no count. No numbers.”
“What do you mean?” Azalea asked.
“I mean I can’t find numbers anywhere,” Bay said. “My family buried this so deep I can’t even find out how many miners died. All I can find are the photos and those articles saying some kind of accident happened. I had to go looking for death certificates. But I can’t even find many of those.”
The seam of a wallpaper panel was coming away from the wall, showing the yellowing glue underneath. Bay’s fingers worried at the edge.
“All those lives,” she said. “All those stories. And we hid it all.”
Every word looked like a stone in Bay’s pocket. She was more than a century removed from this, but still, the guilt had been passed down. No one else had taken it, so it had fallen to her, the Briar bastard, a burden tumbling down stone steps to the lowest point in this family.
Bay looked at Dalia, wincing like Dalia might slap her, or tell her she did not love her, or scream at her that her family were murderers and liars.
“This is what I come from,” Bay said, her voice breaking into pieces as she confessed this to the woman she loved. “This is my family.”
“Who rejected you,” Azalea said. “Forget them. The things they did aren’t yours.”
“I’ve lived off Briar money,” Bay said. “That makes me responsible.”
“You lived off Marjorie’s money,” Calla said.
“I’m still a Briar,” Bay said. “This is still mine.”
“Then let’s do something about it,” Dalia said.
“How?” Bay asked. “It’s done. Those men.” She sank onto the edge of the bed, fingers raking through her hair. “Their blood is on our hands.”
“It’s not done,” Gloria said. “You can tell the truth. Make sure everyone knows what happened.”
“Are you kidding?” Azalea asked. “The Briars will kill her.”
“Not if we have anything to say about it,” Calla said.
Their voices receded against the striped wallpaper.
Estrella tried to listen. But the words floated round the room instead of reaching her. They patterned the bedspread. They stuck to the wallpaper. They caught on the white iron chandelier above them.
The dark earth on the boy she’d found in the sunken garden.
His clothes that seemed a hundred years out of date.
The half-starved look of an overworked boy.
The way he looked for things to do with his hands. The calluses on his fingers, rough as sand.
Everything Estrella had imagined about where he had come from fell away.
The force of it made her buckle toward the wall. She took slow, steadying breaths, but the world would not go still.
Dalia was again holding Bay’s face in her hands, Bay’s eyes shut. The other three were swearing that if Bay told the truth, they would scare Reid and every other Briar into thinking they were witches who would turn them into violets if they laid hands on her.
Estrella slipped from the room, down the stairs, across the open land that gave her a shortcut back to La Pradera.
She found Reid standing on the grass, lighting up a cigar he’d no doubt stolen from the collection Marjorie kept for guests. He’d changed out of his formal clothes, all traces of jacket and pocket square gone. But he looked like he’d dressed himself by pulling pants and a shirt out of the laundry, then grabbing the formal shoes he’d worn for the ball, probably left beside his bed.
How he looked didn’t matter to him. In a man, not caring was a draw, a mark of confidence. In Estrella, who’d worn her eyeliner until it smudged and her ball dress until it wilted, the same not-trying looked sloppy.
What shamed a girl was, in a boy, so often worth showing off.
Reid flicked the cigar. He threw embers over the ground. To him, this land was no different than a crystal ashtray.
The ash struck the earth, and anger gave Estrella words.
“You killed them,” Estrella said.
He took in the sight of her, stained skirt and unbrushed hair.
He flicked another ember. “What?”
“Your family killed them.” Her voice was rising, like a bird’s call echoing off trees.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Men died on your family’s watch,” she said. “And then you covered it up.”
Reid crouched, putting out the cigar in the grass.
Estrella pressed her teeth together, like she could feel the burn on the ground.
Reid blew on the cigar. When it cooled, he tucked it into his pocket, rising to standing again.
He eyed her dress and smudged makeup.
“Clean up,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
How level the words came out startled her, charged but not angry. Low enough that the wind wove through them.
Reid started walking.
“Reid,” Estrella called after him.
He kept walking.
“Stop,” she said, letting her voice go.
She followed him past the fountains and trellises.
“Look at me,” she said, and her voice turned to a yell.
Reid crossed the courtyard of blossoming trees. He was almost to the hedge wall when she caught up with him.
She grabbed his shoulder. She dug her fingers in so hard she could feel the heat of his skin through his shirt, and she wrenched him to make him turn around.
He did turn around, fast and hard.
He backhanded her, like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to hit her or just flick her away.
She was close enough, and he’d let his hand fly fast enough that the impact landed hard. Open hand, his knuckles hitting her mouth.
Her lip split open, and the taste of her blood spread over her tongue.
Estrella stumbled, getting her balance back. Blood stung her lip.
“Nobody’s killed anyone except you and your family,” Reid said.
Estrella’s heartbeat throbbed in her cut lip.
“You’re the reason Bay’s gone, aren’t you?” Reid said.
Estrella spit out the blood in her mouth, the salt so strong on her tongue it was almost sweet. It struck the ground, and the shape of it looked like a trail of red starflowers. They shone on the grass.
She set the side of her thumb against her lip, blotting away the blood.
This was one thing she could use. They hadn’t lost Bay, not yet. But Estrella could still frighten Reid with the stories and whispers about the Nomeolvides girls, their hearts as wild as they were dangerous.
“Not just me,” Estrella said. “All of us.”
She took a step forward, narrowing the gap between her and Reid.
In that moment, she was not just Estrella.
She was Calla, blushing too much to speak as she watched Bay’s careful hands shape yew wood with a rasp and hand plane.
She was Azalea, embroidering Bay’s initials into the hems of her pillowcases.
She was Gloria, stealing old tintype photos from Briar scrapbooks no one ever looked at, trying to work out which distant relatives Bay looked most like.
She was Dalia, her heart lit by the understanding that Bay was not just the one they all loved but also herself.
Estrella took another step, and Reid drew back, preserving the distance.
“That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Estrella asked, letting the sound of taunting slip into her voice. If she apologized for her own heart then she would make it tame, and small. But like this, it was wild, and limitless.
She could see him trying to twist his horror into rage, but Estrella could still find it, that fear.
Estrella was herself, a girl who had loved Bay even while Bay never considered her more than a charming little sister. She was a girl grateful for falling in love like that, because it taught her how. Because when she finally let go of this woman who did not love her back, it was to let her love Dalia. Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.
She was all of them, screaming for Bay to speed faster down the highway in Marjorie’s wine-red four-door. She was the five of them holding their arms out of the windows, their hands riding the night air. She was all of them hushing one another’s laughs and running through the dark as the engine cooled and creaked.
She was each of them, born with the possibility of flowers in their hands, but never feeling like living things themselves until they ran across La Pradera with Bay Briar. They were night-blooming girls, the grass damp under their bare feet and the stars above them as thick as spilled sugar.
“Who knows?” Estrella asked. “Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll all love you next.”
She shoved him, palms against his shoulders. And with more fear than rage he threw the back of his hand across her face again. He struck her like she was a stinging insect to swat away.
The impact shook through her cheek and her forehead. The force opened the cut on her lip wider.
She lifted her chin, showing him the blood on her face, proof that she’d rattled him. Proof that even Briars could not ignore girls with flowers and death in their fingertips.
“What do you think they’re thinking?” Reid asked. “The moment right before they’re gone.”
Blood dripped onto her tongue.
“Do you think they still love you?” Reid asked.
The dry feeling climbed back to Estrella’s throat. She could not shove Reid’s words away just because Bay was still alive. Fel was gone. The loss of him belonged to Estrella.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” Reid said.
The air carried the sour, bitter smell of her family’s tears, a scent like salt and lemon rind in hot water. The faint stirring of every flower she and her family had ever given to La Pradera rushed back, the sound of their petals rising up like the flutter of a million wings.
For a hundred years, her family had put their hands in this ground, and it wanted to hold on to them so much it would never let them go.
Now voices drifted from the sunken garden, so faint Estrella could not make out the words. It was too many voices for her to count, braiding together and then unraveling, weaving into a solid veil of sound and then fraying back into innumerable voices.
Lost lovers.
Men killed and then disregarded.
They were flooding her until there was no room left for her own thoughts. Her tongue was the flame blue of an iris petal. Her skin was the rust silk of dahlias, and her hair and her eyes were handfuls of storm-damp ground. Her heart was a handful of raw buds, red as pomegranate seeds and slicked with rain.
What happened to the miners? She wanted to ask. But calling them the miners felt like disrespect. Not naming them was a betrayal to their lives and deaths.
She only knew the name of one.
“What happened to Fel?” she asked.
“You know what happened,” Reid said. “You killed him.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said.
“Was it fun?” Reid asked. “Making him disappear?”
“I never wanted that,” she said, her voice splintering.
“Did you ever think of his family?” Reid asked. “Or did you not even ask if he had one?”
The ground looked like it was waving under her, billowing like a quilt.
She wanted to root herself here. She was close enough to reach out for her ocean of blue petals. She wanted to vanish into that sea of color, for it to swallow her, drink her. It was a wish that spun and grew until it had its own gravity, so heavy it dragged her to her hands and knees.
Reid’s shadow fell over her.
“You killed him,” he said.
Estrella kept her head down, so all she could see was the shimmer of blue petals. “I cared about him.”
Even with nothing in her vision but ground, she wondered if these words were a lie. Maybe her brutal heart’s version of love was hate, and she didn’t even realize.
Her cousins were life and enchantment. But she was all malice and knives.
“I loved him.” The cracks in her voice deepened. It was more confession than defense.
Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn’t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.
The Briars had killed Fel and all those men. And her family had killed men who came too close.
A wish flickered in her heart to become part of the ground. Fel was gone, and there was nowhere to mourn him. But he had once died in this ground, and now so could she.
It was the closest she could ever be to finding him again.
Her fingers sank into the bed of blue petals, and then into the soft ground. Blood fell from her lip, and the red dyed a forget-me-not petal.
The center of her flooded with every wish for things to be different.
For the treaties that had drawn new borders not to have been signed, so her family would not have lost their land and found they had nowhere to go but this graveyard. For them to never have been declared las hijas del aire or witches.
For La Pradera not to hold on to them so tight it drove the will out of them.
For the air to spin until it gave Fel back, his body and breath reappearing the way they had disappeared.
She wanted all this so much that when her hands sank further into the sand and met resistance, she could imagine what they were finding. Maybe they were meeting young, thin roots, or the closed fingers of unbloomed irises. But she could pretend they were not these things.
She could pretend they were hands.