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My heart twists, painfully. “Then take a step back and look at this situation from a different angle,” I plead. “What do I have to gain from lying about Dane?”
We’ve had so many disagreements, and they all seem so hilariously minor in hindsight. The cheese curds, the airplane, the Hamiltons, Sophie, the Skittle dress. I get it now—that all of those were opportunities for us to have contact with each other. This is the first time we’ve been at a true impasse and I know what he’s going to say before he even gets the words out.
“I think we should probably break up, Olive. I’m sorry.”
chapter nineteen
It’s the quiet before the dinner rush, and I’m doing the final check of my section. Natalia is the fourth family member this week to just happen to stop by Camelia at exactly four o’clock. She said she wanted to say hi to David because she hasn’t seen him in forever, but I know that’s bullshit because Diego—who came by yesterday to hassle me using a similarly flimsy story—said both David and Natalia were at Tía María’s less than a week ago.
As much as the size and presence of my family can feel oppressive at times, it’s the greatest comfort I have right now. Even if I pretend to be annoyed that they’re constantly checking up on me, they all see through it. Because if it were any of them struggling—and it has been, many times—I would find a reason to drop by at four o’clock wherever they work, too.
“Mama, when we’re sad, we eat,” Natalia says, following me with a plate of food as I adjust the placement of two wineglasses on a table.
“I know,” I tell her. “But I swear, I can’t
eat anymore.”
“You’re starting to look like a bobble-headed Selena Gomez.” She pinches my waist. “I don’t like it.”
The family knows Ethan broke up with me, and that Ami and I are “arguing” (although there’s nothing active about it; I called her a few times after our big blow-up, and two weeks later she has yet to return any of my calls). In the past ten days, I’ve been bombarded with well-meaning texts and my fridge is completely packed with food that Mom brings daily from Tío Omar, Ximena, Natalia, Cami, Miguel, Tío Hugo, Stephanie, Tina—almost as if they’ve made a Feed Olive calendar. My family feeds people; it’s what they do. Apparently my missing Sunday dinner for two weeks in a row—because of work—has gotten the entire family on high alert, and it’s driving them all crazy not knowing what’s going on. I can’t blame them; if Jules, or Natalia, or Diego went into hiding, I’d be out of my mind worried. But it isn’t my story to share; I wouldn’t know how to tell them what is happening, and according to Tío Hugo, who came by yesterday to “Um, get a business card for an insurance agent from David,” Ami won’t talk about it, either.
“I saw Ami yesterday,” Natalia says now, and then pauses long enough for me to stop fussing with the table settings and look up at her.
“How is she?” I can’t help the tight lean to my words. I miss my sister so much, and it’s wrecking me that she isn’t speaking to me. It’s like missing a limb. Every day I get so close to caving, to saying, ‘You’re probably right, Dane didn’t do anything wrong,” but the words just won’t come out, even when I test the lie out in front of the mirror. It sticks in my throat, and I get hot and tight all over and feel like I’m going to cry. Nothing all that terrible even happened to me—other than losing my job, my sister, and my boyfriend in a twenty-four-hour period—but I still feel a kind of burning anger toward Dane, as if he slapped me with his own hand.
Natalia shrugs and picks a piece of lint off my collar. “She seemed stressed. She was asking me about someone named Trinity.”
“Trinity?” I repeat, digging around in my thoughts to figure out why the name sounds familiar.
“Apparently Dane had a few texts from her, and Ami saw them on his phone.”
I cover my mouth. “Like sexy texts?” I am both devastated and hopeful if this is true: I want Ami to believe me, but I’d rather be wrong about all of it than have her go through that pain.
“I guess she just asked if he wanted to hang out, and Dane was like ‘Nah, I’m busy’ but Ami was pissed that he was texting a woman at all.”
“Oh my God, I think Trinity was the girl with the mango butt tattoo.”
Natalia grins. “I think I read that book.”
This makes me laugh, and the sensation is like clearing away cobwebs from a dark corner of a room. “Ethan mentioned someone named Trinity. She—”
I stop. I haven’t told anyone in my family about what Ethan told me. I could try to blow Dane’s entire cover story if I wanted, but what good would that do? I don’t have any proof that he was seeing other women before he married Ami. I don’t have any proof that he propositioned me in the bar. I just have my reputation as a pessimist, and I don’t want my entire family looking at me the way Ethan did when he registered that even my twin sister thinks I’m making this all up.
“She what?” Natalia presses when I’ve fallen quiet.
“Never mind.”
“Okay,” she says, fired up now, “what is going on? You and your sister are being so weird lately, and—”
I shake my head, feeling the tears pressing in from the back of my eyes. I can’t do this before my shift. “I can’t, Nat. I just need you to be there for Ami, okay?”
She nods without hesitation.
“I don’t know who Trinity is,” I say, and take a deep breath, “but I don’t trust Dane at all anymore.”
• • •
AFTER MIDNIGHT, I DRAG MY bag from my locker in the back room and sling it over my shoulder. I don’t even bother to look at my phone. Ami isn’t texting, Ethan isn’t calling, and there’s nothing I can say in reply to the forty other messages on my screen every time I look.
