The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(18)

What’s there is too rusty under too many layers of wild overgrowth.

It needs to be rebuilt.

“I hate to interrupt,” Shiloh says below, cutting through another argument that’s broken out amid the Lightly family, “but Estelle, having been on several renovation projects myself, I can safely say—”

Tavi lifts the dog and makes it talk for her again. “Excuse me, but we’re not actually cleaning up this school building, are we?”

“Yes, Octavia, we are ‘getting our hands dirty,’” Estelle says. “‘One cannot get clean without first getting dirty.’”

Willie Wayne groans. “That is not the quote.”

“We most certainly are not.” Margot rises from her seat and grabs her handbag. “Estelle, I have a fashion empire to run. I’m a good person. I donate hundreds of clutches and slingbacks to charity every year—”

“Mismatches and factory rejects,” Estelle interrupts. “And you don’t donate them. You have Octavia give them away as a marketing sham.”

“—and I personally funded a pet shelter—”

“That was a dog mill, dear, and you used my money to run it.”

“—and I also serve food at a community food bank every Christmas.”

“You attend a gala at the Bergamot Club every year with your personal assistant standing in at the food bank.” She crosses her arms over her chest, lifting her chin and frowning at her entire family. “Community service is next to godliness. It’s time we engage with the masses and grace the lowly with our commitment to them.”

“It’s not actually community service if we’re doing it for our own good,” Phoebe says. “How does it benefit the community for us to sleep in a building free of dead birds and rodents? If we really wanted to be better people, we’d live like paupers and see how much we like it. Whitney Anastasia lived in a small building.”

“Because when we’ve become better people and departed this quaint little slice of heaven, I’m donating the building back to the community to be used as the Estelle Lightly Memorial Exhibit. You could say I’m making an improvement over the original screenplay.”

Carter makes a grumbling noise, finishing with an explosion noise and a sweep of his hands.

“Carter’s right,” Michael says. “You’d do the community a greater service if you tore it down.”

None of them agree with Phoebe’s suggestion that they should live like paupers.

Suspect she probably knew that wouldn’t fly.

Tavi pauses in her selfies to point her phone at her brother. “I saw a building like this when I was in Ireland having a girls’ weekend with Alessandra Garofano, except it was actually a castle, and there was ivy growing all up the sides, and it was bigger, and there wasn’t concrete stamped with gender restrictions above the outside entryways, and there were staff to bring me grilled tomatoes in bed. And then make my bed. And provide turndown service. And book our spa services for us. There’s potential. Probably. Maybe.”

“Who’s Alessandra Garofano?” Willie Wayne whispers to Ridhi.

“Some TikTok star living off a trust fund,” Ridhi whispers back. “Bridget’s obsessed.”

I lift a brow. “Bridget is obsessed? Just Bridget?”

She shushes me.

“We are not tearing down the future site of the Estelle Lightly Memorial Exhibit,” Estelle announces. “Rather, we’ll be participating in this community as though we live in a village. Just like Whitney Anastasia did when she learned to buy baked goods from her neighbor to take to other people’s houses for family dinners.”

“She learned to bake herself.” Willie Wayne snorts. “I can’t listen to this anymore.”

“Um, excuse me?” Tavi lifts a hand. Her dog barks at the same time. “Shh, Pebbles, Mommy’s talking. Yes. Excuse me, Gigi. I lived in a Malawian village for three months once.”

Willie Wayne pauses on his way out the door, like he knows things are about to get good again.

“You lived in a five-star hotel a day’s drive from a Malawian village,” Carter says.

“But I went there. And it was hard, Carter. You have no idea what a five-star hotel is like in Malawi. It’s not like the Plaza. And they didn’t have air-conditioning in the village.”

“We don’t have air-conditioning here either,” Estelle says dryly. “And if you would please let me finish, I was going to say that the lowly citizens of this small town have agreed to demonstrate how community works by helping us clean out the larger messes inside the building. Not that any of them have anything better to do, but one can only assume they won’t actually enjoy it either. We’re helping them get to heaven as well.”

Carter sits straighter and eyeballs Shiloh. “We get to be management and boss you around.”

“No, you get to get your hands dirty,” she replies.

He jerks his chin at her. “I’ll get you dirty.”

“I might be bisexual, but I do have taste, and I don’t like to throw up in my mouth this early in the morning. Also, I’m married.”

“Oh, snap,” Ridhi says.

Willie Wayne makes a silent tick mark in the air.

My gaze drifts to Phoebe. She’s frowning, arms crossed, still in the same outfit she wore to pull herself up Bridget’s elevator, and she’s staring at Estelle like she’s waiting for the catch. “You’re allowing us to have help?”