Calla let out a disapproving hum, like a doctor being denied the satisfaction of making a diagnosis.
Azalea shuddered, the way she always did when Estrella grew a dark sky over her bed. Estrella didn’t take it personally; Azalea had more superstition in her heart than she’d ever admit. It was the rest of them that worried Estrella, their concerned faces, like she was a child suffering night terrors. The rest of them drew flowers from the earth and over wooden arbors only when they wanted to.
Azalea drew her eyes away from the ceiling. She nodded at Estrella’s jewelry box, those nests of ribbon, satisfied she didn’t have to tell Estrella’s secrets for her.
Dalia had been smart enough not to keep any evidence. But her cousins knew, as soon as they saw the color bloom in her cheeks. Dalia, too, had fallen a little in love with Bay Briar. With Bay’s laugh, reckless as any boy’s. With how she dressed like a character from one of Gloria’s old novels. Satin trousers to the knee, cinched coat, ivory stockings. On anyone else, it would’ve been a costume. On Bay, it seemed as ordinary as her fine, straw-pale hair, as though she’d been born in a waistcoat.
All five Nomeolvides girls loved Bay Briar. They didn’t just flirt with her to needle their mothers and grandmothers. They didn’t just admire her as some ornament that moved through La Pradera’s gardens. They didn’t all harbor crushes on her just because she was there.
They had all fallen in love with her. With how she could beat her grandmother’s friends at card games, stirring their roars of cigar-smoke laughter as she took their money. With how she swirled and sipped the red-black wine at La Pradera’s parties. (Estrella and her cousins stole bottles and passed them around behind the hedges, seeing how fast the wine could make them feel warm.)
It took only a few minutes standing in the unlit hall for them all to realize what this meant, the love held between them for a girl named Bay Briar.
For as long as anyone had memory, longer than the Nomeolvides women had been at La Pradera, each generation had borne five daughters. Only daughters, always five, like the petals on a forget-me-not. And ever since La Pradera had gotten its hold on them, sure and hard as a killing frost, every generation of five daughters had been trapped in these gardens, like their hearts were buried in the earth.
But Estrella and her cousins couldn’t have five daughters if they were all in love with the same woman.
If they all loved Bay Briar, if they were too lovesick over her to sleep with men, their wombs would stay empty as their hearts were full.
They could be the last generation of Nomeolvides girls. The last ones bound together like forget-me-not petals. The last ones who could not leave La Pradera unless they wanted to die, spraying their pillowcases with bitter pollen they coughed up from their lungs as though it were blood.
The last to see their lovers disappear.
Then dread passed between them.
Nothing good came from the love of Nomeolvides women.
Five years ago, Calla’s father had vanished. Before him, the traveling salesman who’d stayed at La Pradera longer than he’d stayed anywhere in a decade, all because he’d fallen in love with Abuela Flor’s bright laugh. And before him, a man who collected old maps, and who became more of a father to Gloria than the man who’d given her half her blood.
If the love of one woman in this family was enough to make her lover disappear, what would the obsession of five Nomeolvides girls do to Bay?
“No,” all five of them said at once, quiet as whispers, at the thought of Bay vanishing under the weight of their love. Not Bay, who visited the stone house where they all lived by ringing the doorbell, bowing, and announcing herself as the Briar bastard, at your service. Bay, whose mother had left her husband for Bay’s father but had not bothered to take Bay with her. Bay, whose heart always stayed a little bit broken no matter how often her grandmother told her Bay Briar, being rid of the two of them was the best thing that ever happened to you.
And now, with her grandmother in the ground almost a year, the Nomeolvides women gathered around Bay like she was some fragile egg. Estrella’s mother and her cousins’ mothers brought Bay to their table at meal times, expecting her there as much as their own daughters. When Bay was sick, their grandmothers took bowls of blue corn pozole up the hill to the brick house Bay now slept in alone. They set cold cloths under her neck, changed her sheets when her fever soaked them through.
Estrella and her cousins saw the brittle sorrow, the grief drifting off Bay like a mist, and they all wanted to set their lips against her forehead to warm her.
They could not let their hearts destroy this girl they had all secretly loved.
Then Gloria had the idea for the offerings. She whispered into the space between them. “Why don’t we ask it”—here she looked at the floorboards under their feet, as though staring into the ground below the house’s foundation—“to protect her?”
The tilting of their heads turned to slow nods, all of them drawing closer to this hope.
The only thing stronger than the curse of their blood was La Pradera, this flowering world that possessed the Nomeolvides women so deeply it killed them if they tried to leave it. If they did not want Bay vanishing, they needed La Pradera to guard her. From them. If anything could save Bay, it was the force and will of this place. Bay had grown up here the same as they had. This land must have fallen in love with her light footsteps and loud laugh, too. So they would beg La Pradera to give Bay its charm against the venom of their hearts.
In return, they gave the ground everything else they loved. Not just the photo at the back of Gloria’s drawer, or the ribbons Estrella had collected. They took down lockets they admired so much they hung them on walls instead of keeping them in boxes. They gathered copper-backed hand mirrors and tins of apricots they’d sugared on Easter Sunday.
Gloria volunteered her best earrings, the color of champagne, bubbles embedded in the small globes, and her favorite apron—the ruffles in every shade of purple, from lilac to blackberry. She had worn it so many times to candy rose petals that even after she washed it, it smelled sweet as meringue.
Dalia chose the best perfume from her collection, a heavy bottle that held the scent of lavender and dry wood and bergamot oranges. Then, the fondant rose Bay’s grandmother had saved for her off a princess cake from a summer party. She had kept it under a drinking glass so it wouldn’t gather dust, and it had stayed as perfect as when it had topped the cake’s green fondant.