All right. This had gone on long enough. “Thank you, everyone, even you yelling over there for the entire restaurant to hear that you can fix me up, but I can find my own dates.”

I didn’t even believe that myself, and by the silence that responded to me, neither did they.

I was going to take it as a compliment that none of them laughed.

“I know people too,” I told them then stopped. “Stop looking at me like that. I do know people, and I get hit on sometimes. Thank you for your optimism.”

Still, none of them said a word, and that felt nice.

Not.

“I’m not that ugly. I can find someone to date me if I want,” I told them, dryly.

It was Lily who chose to ignore I’d said anything. She slapped the flat of her hand against the table before yelling, “SO HOW ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS? I CAN SEND EVERYONE A LINK TO A GOOGLE FORM WHERE WE CAN SIGN UP LUNA FOR DATES ON CERTAIN DAYS OR WE CAN DO A GROUP MESSAGE.”

Oh hell.

Lydia reached over and set her hand on top of mine, giving me a big smile. “Let us do this for you, Luna, honey. Maybe it’ll be fun. You can trust us. What do you say?”

What did I say?

What did I say?

I held my breath and took a look at the way too eager faces around the table. All of them. Faces of people I loved. Faces of people who loved me—with the exception of Lily’s friends, of course.

But the rest of them….

Lenny punched me in the arm again, just as hard as she had a moment before. “Do it, Luna,” said the woman who had never dated anyone in all the time we had been friends. Not once.

But that was another story.

They wanted me to trust them?

I glanced at the faces again, and I said two words I was worried I might end up regretting big-time. “I guess?”

Chapter 11

The rest of the weekend went by in a blur.

After staying at the restaurant so long that the waiters gave us some serious side-eye, everyone made their way over to my house like I had expected. Our group of fifteen turned into thirty at some point in the evening, and we’d ended up ordering everything off the nearest pizza place’s menu. The Coopers spent a small fortune buying bags of chips and drinks from the gas station, I saw, after they had snuck off for a moment and come back loaded with bags.

I had been in such a good mood that it had only hurt me a little when my sister Lily had come up to me at some point, thrown an arm over my shoulder, and said, “Sugar tits, my friend’s aunt needs help at her restaurant in Galveston this summer, and she said she would hire us. Her parents have a beach house, and she said I could stay with them. She said the tips during the summer are really good, like more than I make now. A lot more.”

She hadn’t been asking me for permission, but she hadn’t been telling me she was going to do it either.

I knew what it meant. Galveston was a beach town a little over an hour away from where we lived. She would be going to stay there. Making money. And while she listened to me, I wasn’t her mom. I was lucky to even be her guardian. Our relationship had always been this weird dance between me being the closest thing to a mom figure she had, and me not wanting to cross the line, balancing being a sister and… her caretaker.

I had never seen myself as being in any position to tell any of my sisters what they should do or how they should live their lives. I had made a thousand mistakes on my own. I was nobody to try and give them advice, much less be any of their role models. Unless something was absolutely a crap idea, I usually kept my mouth shut over what they wanted to do.

I didn’t want her to leave for what I would figure was the rest of the summer.

But…

I had hidden my sadness and smiled at her. “That’s great, Lil. When do you start? Are you going to put in your two-week notice at the restaurant or just call and tell them you aren’t going back?” I asked her, referring to the waitressing job she’d had for the last almost two years.

She had said she was going to put in her two-week notice but claimed her boss would end up firing her when she did. It was what that boss always did, apparently. As long as that happened, then she would be leaving on Friday, she had told me, giving me a kiss on her cheek as she went on about how tan she was going to be and how I could come visit on the weekends and we could hang out on the beach.

Lily hadn’t been wrong. I had been sitting at home the day after her graduation, when she left for work and was still sitting at home when she had come back four hours later, telling me her boss had told her she didn’t need to bother finishing out her two weeks. So, she was leaving.

After spending the rest of Sunday at the house with just Lily, since Thea and Kyra had left early in the morning—one to Austin and the other back to Dallas—the next few days went by fast. I helped her pack a couple of boxes of clothes and went with her to buy a new bathing suit. We went out to dinner with Lenny and Grandpa Gus on Wednesday. And that very morning, on Friday, I had gone to wake her up before I’d left for work and given her about four kisses on her cheeks before we’d said goodbye, with her being half-asleep.

She promised to drive up every couple of weeks, and I had promised to go visit too, but I knew how that went. My other two sisters had promised the same thing, and now I barely saw them but three or four times a year. When I offered to go visit, they didn’t have time for that either.

So my seventeen about-to-be eighteen-year-old sister at a beach house in a party town coming back on a weekend when she probably made the most amount of tips?

I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

Lily would still text me every day. And she was only a phone call away.

So that Friday, a day where I had requested to leave early months ago for a gynecologist appointment, I was trying my best to cling onto every little bit of happiness I could find, which probably explained why I was trying to be extra enthusiastic about decorating for my coworker’s going-away party that day. I had just finished taping up the last chunk of black streamer when a big figure stopped at the door to the break room.

With my arms stretched as high as they could go over my head, and with pieces of tape stuck to my fingers, I turned my head to shoot Ripley a closed-mouth smile. I hadn’t even been remotely surprised he hadn’t stopped by on Saturday. It wasn’t the first time I had invited him to something and he hadn’t shown up. It was no big deal.

“Hey, boss.”

The big man stood there as he looked around the room. “What’s all this?”

“Today is Rogelio’s last day,” I said, pointing at the cardboard letters that spelled out BYE BISH going across the bottom of the break room’s cabinets.

He scratched at his temple.

“I’m on my lunch break,” I threw in before he tried to say something about me not getting paid to decorate for someone’s going-away party. It had been a gray shirt kind of week so far, and I didn’t want to jinx it.

His eyes drifted to the sign and then the two black balloons directly beside them, and all he said was “All right” in that low voice.

Turning back to the streamer, I pressed my finger against the tape one last time to make sure it had stuck and then hopped off the top of the two-step ladder I’d had to drag from my room up here.

“Where’d all this come from?” he asked, surprising me.

I folded the ladder in on itself and propped it up against the counter. “I brought it from home. I used it for my sister’s going-away party two years ago.” I glanced back at him and gave him a smile.

“I have some blue streamer at home if you want me to use it for your next birthday,” I tried to joke around.

His snicker as he stood there made me smile even wider.

“There’s cake. If you want a piece, Rogelio said he’d come up here in—” I glanced at my watch. “—ten minutes.”

My boss didn’t move, but he wasn’t done asking questions. “What kind?”

“Angel food.”

One of those hands went up as he scratched at his throat, exposing maybe a millimeter more of it than usual. “You make it?” he asked in that calm voice that was probably my favorite of all.

“Nope.” With Lily leaving, I hadn’t wanted to waste thirty minutes I could have with her on something else. “I got it from the grocery store. I’ll save you a piece and put it in the veggie drawer if you aren’t around,” I offered before tearing my eyes away so I could finish picking up my mess. Everything had been so hectic, I’d barely gotten a chance to think about the last long-ish conversation we’d had—the one that included Rip telling me he still owed me.