The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(91)

“C’mon, Elmo,” I murmur to my kitten as I scoop him up and head out of the janitor’s closet.

“Are you completely moving out of your room?” Gigi calls after me. “Because if you are, I’m expanding my services to a few acquaintances of mine whose children need some improvements to their soul, and I might need the space.”

Elmo meows in horror.

“Don’t listen to her, sweetie,” I whisper to him. “She loves making idle threats when she doesn’t get her way. And sometimes when she can’t handle that she did get her way too.”

“I’m serious, young lady,” she calls after me. “I am bringing souls back to the Upper East Side.”

Gigi still has a long way to go.

But she also has a lot more years to make up for.

And that’s okay.

We all do our best. It’s what we’ve got.





Chapter 32


Phoebe


Almost six weeks to the day after we arrived in Tickled Pink, my family is out on the freshly cut football field behind the school, tables lined up in rows, tents set up to cover the food we’re trying to protect from the mosquitoes, though it would probably be better if we let the mosquitoes eat it.

They’d die of food poisoning.

My family did, after all, make this food. I’m not certain our thank you for welcoming us dinner will have quite the impact we want it to.

Unless we kill the mosquitoes. Then we all benefit from not getting eaten alive.

“Are we sure this is edible?” I hiss to Tavi as I spot the first brave souls approaching from the parking lot.

“If it’s not, they’ll leave sooner,” she hisses back.

“Quit being sissies,” Carter mutters. “You literally had to cut a watermelon.”

“I made a three-bean salad, Carter, and it was hard to pick which beans,” Tavi shoots back.

My watermelon and I decide to stay out of it.

Cutting fruit is not yet one of my hidden talents, and we know better than to insult Carter’s fried chicken.

Yes.

Fried chicken.

My brother, the worthless not-quite-one-hit-wonder rock star, made fried chicken for five hundred people. And yes, it smells delicious.

Tavi suddenly spins so her back is to the gathering crowd. “Have you heard from Mom?”

“With what cell signal or Wi-Fi?” Despite my suspicions that Gigi will be announcing tonight that she will, in fact, fund the promised scholarship for the town with no additional requirements on the locals, we’re still banned and blocked from access to the outside world.

I think she’s also announcing that she’s fixing up the community center to give back to the town as a working community center with massive improvements.

Niles talks a lot when you get him hyped up on caffeine, and my grandmother might’ve been doing more soul-searching than I was giving her credit for, and she really doesn’t know how to be a kind person in public. She’s still battling her own walls.

“You’re going to school three days a week,” Tavi says. “Mom might’ve emailed, and I know you check your messages there.”

“Have you seen the Tickled Pink Papers?” I reply.

Her cheek twitches. “Phoebe. You know you can’t believe everything you see in a small-town gossip page.”

“Except for the part where everything else they’ve printed is true.” And now they’re reporting that the gossip pages back home in New York are saying Mom’s checked herself into a spa.

A special kind of spa.

The kind of spa that rich people go to when they need to recover from nervous breakdowns.

And that said nervous breakdown was caused by rumors hitting the Post about my proposition of my boss’s boss in my attempt to get a promotion earlier this year.

I’m well and truly ruined in New York, and I don’t care.

I wasn’t happy there.

Not like I am here.

“I’m off email, and I’m off phone, and I’m working on me. I don’t even have my phone on me. Teague’s holding it until I’m ready to face it.”

Also, Teague would 100 percent let me use his Wi-Fi if I asked him for the password.

We’ve moved past I want to torture you any way I can and into I like you, I know you’re struggling, and I’m here to support you for whatever you feel you need territory.

He definitely has the harder job in our relationship, though he’s fooling himself if he thinks I’m not doing anything for him.

He’s expanding his viewpoint on outsiders and coming to realize that not everything outside the Tickled Pink borders is inherently evil. And he’s welcome.

Dylan, the plumber, approaches our table.

Victim number one.

Volunteer, I mean. Volunteer number one.

This is good. He knows toilets. He can fix anything that breaks as a side effect of masses of people eating our food.

The townspeople probably coordinated this.

“Hey, Tavi.” He nods to me, too, while Tavi makes the tiniest noise of acknowledgment beneath her oh my God, hide me face, her back still to the table. He keeps talking like she’s not actively ignoring him. “Carter. Phoebe. You playing snowshoe baseball with us next week when we take on Deer Drop?”

“No, I’m running the dunk tank,” I tell him.