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I do want to someday be a mom if it’s not too late. But for now, I adopt and foster dogs.
“Are the three of you still competing?”
“Always. It’s in good fun.”
“What if the firstborn is a boy?”
“Easy, Rosario, Rosaire, Rossano...”
“Sounds too much like Ross.”
“Ew. True. I’ll have to rethink that for your sake.” She nudges me as the dogs gambol about. “Come on, gimme the scoop.”
“Are you counting on my having been miserable?”
“No, I was hoping Romy and Ross’s wedding cake got eaten by a roving pack of wild boars, the cake toppers were beheaded, or the groomsmen got drunk and cannonballed into the cake.”
“Those are oddly specific.”
“Hashtag wedding fails.”
“And they all have to do with cake.”
“I’m hungry.”
And after this weekend, I need a win. My father has a saying about how the McGuinesses are among the salt of the earth. We just keep on keeping on. Doing the next right thing then, the one after that, but is it too much to ask to have something sweet, just once?
Maybe myoncewas last night, and that’s it.
A flash of love at first sight. A temporary case. However, my vision has now been restored. Magnus was a stormy, unsmiling jerk. Glad that’s over.
Who am I trying to kid? I can’t stop thinking about him and I’m trying to protect this beat-up heart of mine. I tell myself to despise him for leaving so abruptly. No goodbye. No smile. Nothing.
“I never liked Ross,” Rosalie says.
I try to substitute that name forMagnusand then echo it in my voice, in my head. It doesn’t work. “You never met him.”
“But I did hear you talking to Romy on the phone that time, and she was—” Rosalie mutters some words in Spanish under her breath.
After befriending Rosalie and Robyn within the first week of arriving in Coco Key, I learned the former only knows swears in Spanish but can understand the spoken language perfectly, and the latter is fluent in English and Spanish for legalese but doesn’t know any slang or swears.
“So, give me the scoop. I want to know how it all went down.”
Rosalie Batista is part of the Nosy Rosies. All the women in her family have a variation of the name Rosa and are always the first to know about the goings-on in town. Recently, a flock of flamingos appeared, indicating love was in the air—of the Isla and Royal variety. Sure enough, they were behind it. Apparently, it’s an island thing.
“I still can’t believe you accepted her invitation to be her maid of honor after what they did.”
“Me neither, to be honest. I said yes because I’d made an agreement with myself to say yes, instead of no because I‘d been hearing lots of no’s in my life. Then couldn’t talk myself out of it.”
“My tía Rosalinda always said, “May your yesses be yesses, your no’s be no’s, and youray,ay,ayesbe loud.”
“Exactly. But it went just as you’d expect. Romy was demanding and obnoxious but looked beautiful.”
“And Ross? Tell me he looked like a toad in a tux.”
“Very much like a toad and not the kind that turns into a prince.”
She laughs. I can’t quite muster a chuckle.
