Without the horses to turn over in her hands, she didn’t sleep easily. Without them to count like sheep, the night streamed out in front of her, smooth and endless.
There was magic to things that were familiar and ordinary. The way they were known was a kind of enchantment, and when they were gone, the spell broke.
Estrella had given him the horses because it had seemed like the kind thing to do. It had felt like returning something he had lost. But they had made him sadder, like their wooden wings opened something in him. That made her wish she’d hidden them all in her dresser, tucking them under her slips and sweaters so this boy, Fel, wouldn’t have to see them. But she had offered them, and he had accepted them—more like a responsibility than a gift.
Each time she woke, Estrella checked the ceiling for the green of vines and the blue of starflowers. But the space above Dalia’s bed stayed clear, the wood bare. That was something.
In the morning, the man called Reid had not left. Estrella and her cousins knew because three of their grandmothers had gone up to the brick house. They had pretended they were there to clean it, and because men who stood so proud in pressed slacks and wrinkled shirts were used to having brown-skinned women wait on them, he seemed not to notice.
Worse than not leaving, he had unpacked his things into an empty room. Not Marjorie Briar’s. Estrella was thankful for that. If he had stuffed his clothes into her inlaid dresser and slept in her four-post bed, Dalia would have slit his throat in his sleep.
In the old carriage house, he had parked a gleaming car, all leather and shined chrome. Gloria almost spit onto the steering wheel, and Calla asked if they could drag an old key across the paint.
“You’re not doing anything,” their mothers said. “You don’t know anything about him yet.”
But they didn’t need to know more than that Bay did not want him there. They saw in how tightly she held her shoulders, like they were a wooden hanger and the rest of her was dangling loose like a coat. They saw it in how she set her back teeth as Reid walked across the grounds, pointing out retaining walls that needed repairing or rose trellises that seemed a little overgrown.
“Why don’t we just go welcome him?” Azalea asked as the light was falling that afternoon.
Calla and Gloria looked ready to throw ice water on her, to break her out of the spell of this man’s polished car and gold-banded watch.
“He’s probably used to having girls like us fixing his drinks,” Azalea said. “He won’t give it another thought.”
The pinched corner of her smile told the rest.
“So we get him drunk enough that he forgets his own name,” Estrella said.
Azalea drew up one proud shoulder. “Then maybe we go through his things.”
“Okay,” Gloria said. “But how do we get him that drunk?”
“I know how to do it,” Fel said.
Their eyes all found him. He’d been quiet, drawing so close to the edges of the room he seemed like a panel of wallpaper. Estrella hadn’t noticed he was there.
“You know how to make drinks?” Gloria asked.
He blinked, like he was pulling back from his own words, surprised he had said them.
He had said them without thinking.
This would be how Estrella would get him to tell things he either would not say or did not believe he knew. She would get him to speak without thinking.
“I know how to make a drink that’ll make a man like that get drunk quick,” he said. “But it’s not Christmas, so I don’t think we have what we need for it.”
He spoke without hesitation, but he had the slight edge of an accent that reminded Estrella of her grandmother’s. But her grandmother’s was both fuller and sharper, more certain. He seemed unused to the sound of his own voice.
“What do you need?” Dalia asked.
“Sherry,” Fel said.
“Done,” Azalea said. “We’ll steal it from Marjorie’s liquor cabinet.”
“We don’t steal from the dead,” Gloria said.
“Why not?” Azalea asked. “She’s not using it.”
Dalia cut through their arguing with a sweep of her hands. “What else do we need?”
“Oranges,” he said, wincing, like he was asking for the moon to pour out into cut crystal. “And sugar. Ice if you have it.”
Azalea’s look was tinged with pity, but brightened with her own amusement. “I think we can manage that.”
Estrella wanted to pinch Azalea so she would not laugh at him. Whether this boy had loved a Nomeolvides woman a hundred years ago or not, they had his clothes and his wonder about phones and showers to tell them this was not his time. He had come from a time when poor men could not easily get sugar or oranges. These were things boys like him knew only on holidays.
The six of them went up to the great brick house. They filled the empty kitchen. Azalea and Fel went to work on the drinks, him pouring sherry and sugar and her slicing oranges.
Azalea set curls of rind on each glass. She grabbed one and took a sip. “You can’t even taste the sherry.” She passed it to her cousins.
“That’s the idea,” Fel said, with no trace of pride.
“I like you,” Azalea said. “You’re smarter than you look. I’ve decided you can be our brother.”
Fel gave her a cringing smile.
A chill spun through the kitchen. Every time one of them declared him a brother or a cousin, or their mothers and grandmothers pronounced him a nephew or son, they remembered that they did not know what the gardens wanted.
Estrella was sure the gardens were asking them to care for him, proof that they would do anything, even look after a strange boy, in exchange for La Pradera saving Bay.
But that was only the part they knew. There would be more. The gardens never let themselves be understood this easily.
Azalea brought the drinks into a damask-curtained room. Bay and Reid sat talking on antique chaises, each upholstered with different color brocade.
Fel handed Reid a glass, and Azalea leaned down to Bay and whispered the reminder Gloria had asked her to pass on, that she should drink slowly. For a few seconds, the dark curtain of her hair shielded both her face and Bay’s.
“It’s expensive, Bay,” Reid said as the Nomeolvides girls listened from the hallway. “All those parties.”
“Those parties”—Bay struck each syllable hard—“kept this place going. They kept this town going. And they made sure the town loved us. That’s more than I can say for any other estate this family has.”
Reid let the insult fall. “I know they meant something to Marjorie. But now that she’s gone, we have to think about the books.”
How dare he.
Estrella felt the words rising in all of them.
This man couldn’t dream to be even a shadow of Marjorie Briar.
Marjorie had loved this place like it was part of her own body. She had grown up at La Pradera because the Briars had exiled her father here for crimes she never spoke of. When she grew up, they mocked her investing money into bakeries and dress shops, whispering that the businesses of women would not give her the same returns as banks or silver mines.
But later, when the Briars had spent more money than they had, when they had almost ruined themselves trying to look wealthier than any other family, they tried to sell La Pradera.
Marjorie wasn’t having it, not the sale of her childhood home. She prodded and stoked the rumors about the Nomeolvides women haunting the land, about their disappearing men, until no buyer would come near the property line. So the Briars had no choice but to let her pay the overdue taxes and declare the land hers.
Marjorie did not fear the lore of this place or the Nomeolvides women, the stories of disappearing men. These gardens were the home of her girlhood. She and the grandmothers built a steady business selling seeds and bulbs to rich men on the promise that they held a little of La Pradera’s enchantment.
“We?” Bay asked. “‘We’ have to think about the books? I haven’t seen you here for, what, ten years?”
“I came to help you,” he said. “This place could be making more money than you know what to do with.”
No.
Again, a word passed between the cousins like a breath.
No.
For months, Bay had lived with her shoulders a little rounded, made small not just by the loss of Marjorie Briar but by the understanding that she was expected to replace her. She would be the one the town looked to for those grand parties that kept the shops open. She would be the one to spin tales of what beautiful gardens wealthy men could expect if only they bought a little Nomeolvides enchantment for their own estates. She would be the one expected to remember a thousand names, the ages of children, the favorite books or colors that Marjorie recalled as easily as her own birthstone.
For months, Bay had been choking. Her flourishes had grown stiff, her smiles more nerves than charm. But with every meal in the Nomeolvides women’s stone house, with every plate of mole poblano, Bay sat up a little straighter. A thread of light in her came back. Bay was coming alive again. “You watch, mijas,” Abuela Mimosa said a week ago. “Three months, she’ll be throwing an autumn ball as good as her grandmother’s.”
And now, this man was shoving his way into this house and deciding Marjorie’s place was his.
And Bay was letting him.
Reid took another swallow of his drink, his posture a little looser than a few minutes before.
Azalea nodded to them. The other four took off their shoes so their feet would be silent. They rushed up the dark wood staircase and tore through Reid Briar’s things.
Estrella and Dalia threw aside clothes and cuff links, books and boar-bristle shave brushes.
“Don’t go so fast,” Gloria said. “We have to put everything back where it was.”
Dalia found a stack of papers in the lining of Reid’s suitcase. She let out a whispered but triumphant, “Yes.”
The heavy sheet of the cover page was printed with a lawyer’s letterhead. Estrella caught several copies of a court seal. But the sentences, thick and dry, were slow to give up their secrets.
“It’s in legal,” Azalea said.
“Give me that.” Calla snatched the papers, dividing them between her and Gloria.
They skimmed the pages, leafing through.
Their glances flicked up at each other at the same time.
They caught each other’s eyes and fell into laughter so heavy they tumbled onto the thick duvet covering the bed.
“What?” Estrella asked.
The two laughing cousins tried to sit up, but one look at each other, and the laughter pulled them both under. The papers scattered over them like leaves.
Dalia grabbed at a sheaf of papers.
“Hey,” Calla said, still laughing.
“As best I can tell,” Gloria said, swallowing her own laughter, not looking at Calla in case it started her up again, “this shining tribute to the Briar name”—she consulted the papers again—“attended a party at another family’s estate and started a fire that caused a fortune of damage before they could get it out.”
Calla giggled, handing Dalia the letters to and from the lawyer’s office. “He was trying to show off by lighting a cigar with a candelabra.”
“That’s not funny,” Estrella said. “What if somebody was hurt?”
Gloria passed Estrella one of the papers. “Nobody was.” She leaned on her elbow, the duvet fluffing up around her. “Unless you count the Briars’ bank accounts. They paid for everything.”
Dalia shook her head at the papers. “So that’s what he’s doing here.”
“What do you mean?” Estrella asked.
“He thinks he can make money here,” Dalia said. “He wants to repay it. Get back in their good graces.”
“Fat chance of that,” Calla said. “Did you see the amount?” She fell back onto the bed. “All those priceless books.”
“Irreplaceable artwork,” Gloria said. “Antique furniture.”
“And the piano,” Calla said, still lying down but lifting a finger into the air. “Don’t forget the piano.”
Dalia still shook her head. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Gloria asked, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes.
“This is where Briars get exiled,” Dalia said. “No one ever came here because they wanted to. They sent him here.”
The truth settled over Estrella.
La Pradera, as beautiful as the gardens made it, was the place the Briars banished relatives they wanted out of the way. Marjorie’s father, with his shameful legacy she would never speak of. Bay, a child made by a Briar daughter’s affair. And now Reid, who had cost his family more money than Estrella thought books and a piano could be worth.
A hundred years ago, this land was the ugliest of the Briars’ estates. The great house stood on rocky ground overlooking a barren ravine. The Nomeolvides women had been making a home in town but were a few Sundays from being driven out as witches. Anywhere they tried to live, peonies and flowering willows broke through rafters. Water lilies choked ponds and streams.
So the outcast Briars issued to these women an invitation: If you can grow anything on this land, you can live here, too. The Nomeolvides women answered by turning this place into La Pradera, acres of blooms and flowering trees, a barren ravine coated in vines and blossoms until it was worthy of being called a sunken garden.
The only reason the other Briars didn’t move in and take this place for themselves was the shadow of the Nomeolvides legacy, their fear that anywhere the women had touched was a place men disappeared.
“She’s right,” Estrella said. “He wouldn’t be here if he had a choice.”
“Maybe Reid’s not as stupid as he looks,” Gloria said. “You know what Marjorie used to say. When they’re about to run you out of town…”
“Get in front of the crowd and make it look like the parade,” Calla said.
Reid Briar meant to turn a punishment into an opportunity.
The four of them put everything back, smoothing the duvet, hanging the clothes up, sliding the papers into the suitcase pocket. They slipped back down the stairs and into their shoes.
Azalea and Fel were still keeping Reid’s glass full. Estrella and her other three cousins stopped in the doorway so fast they bumped into one another, skirts brushing.
Reid, his eyes reddened from the sherry that did not taste like sherry, looked up. His gaze caught Fel’s.
“I thought it was all girls here,” he said.
Fel stilled.
“They’re not girls, Reid,” Bay said, “they’re women. And he’s theirs.”
“Who is he?” Reid asked, as though the boy he was looking at could not hear him.
“He’s our brother,” Azalea said. And it felt true, like the land had given them a brother when they had never had one.
“He’s our cousin,” Gloria said at the same moment. And this too felt true, even though they had never had boy cousins, either.
The words spoken at the same time made Gloria and Azalea whip their heads toward each other.
Reid might not have known they did not have brothers or boy cousins, but they had wavered, and now he watched them all.
Fel looked at Estrella. The terror in his face was as clear as a spoken question. Please don’t tell him. Please don’t tell this stranger what little you know and how I know even less.
“He’s with me,” Estrella said. Not only because she had been the one to find him. Not even because her cousins blamed her little wooden horses for the appearance of this strange boy. But because this was an explanation for their nervousness that Reid might believe. That what they were hiding was how a boy none of them were married to lived with them. “He goes with me.”
Reid looked from each of their faces to the next.
“Why didn’t you just say that?” he asked. “There’s no rule against that. That’s allowed.”
The tension came into Bay’s jaw so fast Estrella could see it. She felt it in her own bones, the muscles around her mouth hardening.
Azalea looked at the rest of the cousins, one eyebrow lifting, her open-mouth smile showing how she was too disbelieving to be angry yet.
Under Reid’s friendly permission was the rough ground of what he wanted them all to understand. He was here now, so he was the one who would say what was allowed.
Dalia leaned into Estrella. “I guess we get to keep him.”
A breath fell from Estrella. Dalia was right. Now that Estrella had claimed Fel as theirs, they couldn’t put him in this house, no matter what Bay had offered.
“Fel or Reid?” Calla asked.
“Both,” Gloria said.
“Give it two days,” Dalia whispered, with a flick of her eyes toward Reid. “Bay’ll be sleeping with us to avoid him.”