“But I didn’t—he shouldn’t,” Dani sobbed. “Or he couldn’t! Except he does really seem to like me, and he’s inhumanly wonderful, so perhaps he could, and if he did, I’ve just ruined everything.”

“Sorry, don’t let me throw you,” Eve said, “I’d just like to check before we go any further. Are you telling me that your fake boyfriend, who you have, obviously, been sleeping with—”

“Bravo, by the way,” Chloe interjected.

“—told you he loved you, and you decided, for some reason, that he’d . . . made it up?”

“Yes,” Dani managed in a very small voice.

“And what,” Eve asked delicately, “did you say to him in return?”

“I said . . . I said we’d made a mistake.”

“Oh sweet fucking Christ,” Sorcha muttered. “Baby Jesus in a manger, give me strength. Danika Brown, if I strangle you—”

“Don’t be angry with me,” Dani snapped. “It wasn’t—I wasn’t ready for this! All I asked for was a nice, goddess-mandated fuck buddy, and the signs led me to believe that I’d gotten one.”

“Oh, for shite’s sake, Dani!” Sorcha cried. “You know that’s not how signs and invocations work. You’re not supposed to use random happenings as an excuse to avoid dealing with what you really want. You’re supposed to pay attention to what resonates. You’re supposed to take a fucking hint!”

“Is that honestly your best solution?” Dani demanded. “Focusing on what I want? Because that would involve letting myself be lost and confused and in love with him, which is a lot to fucking deal with, Sorcha!” She hadn’t had a chance to work through the pros and cons, or check it for safety from every angle. For heaven’s sake, she hadn’t even written it down, and nothing even counted until you wrote it down, which meant that Dani was currently engaged in the highly dangerous practice of loving Zaf without a permit, so no wonder she’d fucked it up, and—

“Oh my God,” she gasped. Her thoughts, her breaths, her heart, all lurched to a stop.

Loving him. Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

She loved him.

Dani turned the idea left and right, examined it cautiously as if a vicious alien might burst out from its middle, and finally judged it to be irrefutably true, if not totally safe. She loved Zaf. Which would explain why she’d felt as if she were being crushed by a wheel of terror when he’d had the audacity to love her, too.

Sorcha clapped her hands. “Oh, there we go. There it is. Give the girl a prize.”

Dani burst into tears again.

“Sorcha,” said Eve, who appeared to be—for once—concentrating fully on the matter at hand. She’d even taken her AirPods out. “I’m not entirely following this conversation, and Dani is alarming me. Tell us what you know, or we’ll sic the cat on you.”

Sorcha looked around. “What cat?”

Chloe removed her glasses and polished them on the edge of her cherry-printed swing skirt, a gesture she no doubt hoped was threatening. “He prefers to avoid company unless absolutely necessary,” she said, “but make no mistake, he is a fearsome creature, indeed.”

“What on earth are you—?”

Dani decided now might be a good moment to pull herself together and explain things to her sisters. “When Zaf and I started sleeping together,” she said, her voice shaking slightly, “we had rules. I always have rules. It makes things . . . safer.”

“Safer than what?” Chloe frowned.

Dani took several deep breaths and dabbed at her face with more tissues before answering. She laid out the facts for herself as much as for anyone else, building a map to her own emotions—emotions she’d clearly kept locked away for far too long, if she barely recognized them when she stumbled into their path.

“Safer than feeling things,” she said. “Because feelings hurt. Rules don’t. But everything with Zaf was so easy that I forgot the risks—until things went too far, and suddenly, he loved me. It just . . . it didn’t seem plausible. Or safe. I didn’t want to fail or fuck it up. I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t want to admit he could hurt me.”

Chloe eyed her carefully. “I see. Completely understandable. But, darling . . . you seem hurt right now, and I’m willing to bet he is, too. So whatever path you chose to avoid that issue—”

“Was the wrong one,” Dani whispered, cradling her head in her hands. “I know. I know. You don’t need to tell me that.” Not anymore, anyway. Because she was using real logic now, not fear-driven desperation, and it was achingly clear that trying her best for Zafir and failing would’ve been far less painful than . . .

Than giving up. He’d told her he loved her, and she’d just given up.

Her first instinct was that he might be better off without her. But then she remembered that she was Danika fucking Brown, that she had Inez Holly’s email address, that she achieved her goals no matter what, and if she made loving Zaf—properly, the way he deserved—one of those goals, she could do it.

Assuming he wanted her to, which, after this morning’s fiasco, was doubtful.

“I’m going to fix things,” Dani said, because speaking the words aloud would make them realer. “I’m going to do my best, anyway.”

“I’m glad,” Chloe said gently. “But, darling, I have to ask: this unfortunate incident aside, are you all right? With your . . . feelings, and such?”

Dani hesitated. Then she whispered honestly, “I’m not sure.”

Chloe pinned her with an all-seeing, older sister stare and made a soft, encouraging sound that meant, Do tell, before I drag it out of you on pain of death.

Apparently, by engaging in a very snotty relationship-related breakdown, Dani had tipped her hand. Her strange-and-possibly-unhealthy-attitude-toward-relationships hand. For the sake of her remaining shreds of dignity, she tried her best to resist spilling her guts. Unfortunately, her iron will was more aluminum today, so after a few seconds, the whole story came tumbling out.

Mateo and the things he’d said, Dani’s abject humiliation and gut-wrenching pain. The failures and rejections that came after, and the decision she’d made to avoid romance for good. All the things Dani had learned about love—or rather, about protecting herself from it—flooded the room, and her sisters descended into solemn silence. As she spoke, her shoulders lifted and her stormy emotions calmed, all the fears she’d never admitted to finally flowing free. By the time she was done, a weight that had lived in her gut for years had disappeared. Without it, she stood taller and saw things from an angle she hadn’t been able to reach in a while.

Hmm. Fascinating. Perhaps discussing emotional nonsense did have some uses after all. It certainly made her feel better, and wasn’t that her latest goal? Taking care of herself as if she deserved it?

You do deserve it. Maybe if she’d really understood that fact, she wouldn’t have hyperventilated at the unreserved tenderness in Zaf’s eyes that morning.

As Dani’s halting speech ended, everyone—even Chloe—left their various seats to join her on the carpet, slipping an arm around her shoulders or squeezing her hand. She was surrounded by her sisters and her best friend, and it felt like being wrapped up in a blanket as soft as clouds and strong as armor. This was love, and part of her had always known that if she shared her darkest thoughts with these women, she’d receive such love instantly. Maybe she’d held off because deep down, she hadn’t thought she deserved it.

Dani was starting to realize she’d treated the opinion of everyone who’d ever left her as an irrefutable truth: Danika Brown is not worthy of love. The trouble was, building a conclusion based on irrelevant or unreliable sources never worked. And when it came to Dani’s worthiness, the only source she should really value was herself.

“Well,” Sorcha said after a moment. “I had no idea about all that.”

“Nor,” Chloe murmured broodingly, “had I.” She paused. “Possibly because you never really tell us anything, darling.”

Dani sniffed and scowled under the weight of three patient stares. “Yes, I do,” she lied.

“No, you don’t,” Eve said. “I used to just read your diary, but then I got too old to avoid feeling guilty about it.”

Dani stared. “Remind me to smack you for that at a later date.”

“Why would I possibly remind you to smack—”

“Girls,” Chloe interrupted. “Let’s focus on the issue at hand, shall we?”

The issue, Dani assumed, being her sudden verbosity in the case of emotional sharing. She supposed her siblings’ and even Sorcha’s stares of astonishment were warranted; she certainly couldn’t remember ever word-vomiting all her pointless problems at anyone before. Except these days, they didn’t seem so pointless, and she had a feeling that Zaf—Zaf, who always listened; Zaf, who always cared; Zaf, who wanted everyone to know themselves—was partially responsible for that.

She’d hate him for it, only she was quite tragically in love with him, so hate was proving difficult.

“I remember that little shit Mateo,” Chloe went on. “Never liked him. I don’t trust southerners.”