Chapter 1
THEA
Whoever came up with the phrase “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” is a dirty liar.
The gigantic rock catches the light, sending a swirl of colors around it, like living inside a kaleidoscope. But the brightness is nothing compared to the smile on my little sister’s face as she wiggles her fingers.
There were a lot of things I expected when I came in for my shift at Cibare, an intimate Italian restaurant in our small town halfway between Orlando and Daytona Beach. Having to tolerate creepy men so I can get enough tips to pay my rent. Knowing I’ll have twice the number of tables as usual because our asshole manager cut down on the staff to trim the fat. Avoiding said asshole boss at all costs.
What I didn’t have on my bingo card was my twenty-three-year-old sister showing up in my section, waving around an engagement ring the size of the Hope Diamond while yelling, “Surprise!”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Addy asks with a sigh, straightening the ring when it slides sideways on her finger. “Harrison said we can get it sized so it stops twisting like that, but I can’t bear the idea of taking it off.”
Harrison. The man my baby sister is apparently marrying. This is the first time I’ve heard the name. I didn’t even know he existed before today, a fact I don’t have time to unpack when there’s someone at one of my tables yelling about the amount of ice in her iced tea, another patron calling out, “When you have a second,” and a third frantically waving his hand through the air like an inflatable tube man to signal for the check. The terrifying stack of bills at home is the only thing keeping me from blowing them all off and demanding an—inevitably long—explanation. Why would Addy hide a guy she’s dating, much less serious enough about to marry?
A voice in the back of my mind whispers he isn’t the one she’s hiding.
I shake off the intrusive thought. She loves me. We’ve been there for each other through everything. Thea and Adelaide. Tia and Addy. The Pappas girls. Just the two of us.
Until now.
I keep my eyes glued to Addy, pretending like I don’t see Tube Man waving even more aggressively in my periphery. “So, Harrison?”
A dreamy look takes over her face, blissed out like our mom after one hit too far. Not that she’d remember those days.
“He’s the best, Tia,” she says, the lifelong nickname that belongs solely to her slipping easily from her tongue. “If I could make a perfect man, he’d be it. I laugh with him, like, all the time. And he’s gorgeous. The most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”
Another pair of eyes—the one I guarantee would actually win the mantle of Most Beautiful Eyes—flash in my mind, and I push the memory away.
“He sounds great, Addy,” I say. “But … isn’t it fast?”
Her body stiffens and her smile slips before she plasters it back in place, like a construction worker half-heartedly spackling the side of a building for repair.
“We knew each other for over a year before we started dating.”
“Because he’s your boss,” I say slowly, still working through the sixty-second info dump she gave me when I walked up.
She breathes deeply through her nose, then slips on a patient, if slightly exasperated, smile. “Harrison is not my boss. He was my supervisor, but he moved to another department almost a year before he asked me out.”
“Another department of the company his family owns that you work for. I know I’m not a professional”—I put the word in air quotes—“but isn’t that, like, a big no-no?”
“There’s no conflict if I’m not reporting to him,” she says, her voice going higher with each word, and I imagine a timer counting down on her forehead, a bomb about to explode. But before it can, she sucks in another breath, calming the rage in a way I never mastered. “I know him. I love him. And I’m not giving up my soulmate because the way we met isn’t perfect. I’ve never felt connected to someone like this before.”
I tense my muscles to stop my flinch in its tracks. It’s not that I don’t want her to find someone to spend her life with. It’s just that she’s slowly slipped away from me over the years since I aged out of the foster system and we were separated. But this moment, her creating a family of her own, feels like the final step in our relationship’s inevitable doom.
“Why the rush? You’re so young.”
She’s barely out of college with a little over a year in the real world. I’m five years older and have no idea what I want in life. How can she?
“Why should I wait?” she asks, her pleasant demeanor holding up, but the tightness in her words—something only I’d notice—gives away her frustration. “I want to marry him. He wants to marry me.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Stop, Thea,” she says. Her use of my real name is like a slap to the face. “Have I ever done something irresponsible?”
The implication is clear. She’s the levelheaded one. The one who always makes the right decision, who thinks things through and weighs all options before jumping in.
Meanwhile, I’m the screwup. The one who lets my emotions get the best of me. My temper and inflexibility have cost us plenty over the years.
“I’ll give you a minute to look over the menu,” I say around the knot in my throat, rushing to check on my tables before Addy can say anything else.
I should go straight to the man whose frustration over the wait has gotten progressively louder, but I need a friendly face, so I stop by the young couple’s table near the front. The boyfriend has a gleam of sweat on his forehead, and I give him an encouraging smile, a nonverbal reminder that I have his back. The ring will come out with dessert, just as we planned earlier today.
Moments like these are what keep me here. Cibare is one of the nicer restaurants in town, a place families and friends come to celebrate big events. I get to watch and play a small part in these happy moments that build a life. Pour the wine that the couple will use to toast to twenty years. Help put the young girl at ease when her parents bring her out to a fancy birthday dinner. Take the picture that will go on the fridge of the family celebrating their son’s college graduation. Things I never got to experience.
I swing by Tube Man’s table to put him out of his misery before heading back to Addy.
She takes my hand as soon as I come into reach. “I know this is all … unexpected, but I need your support. He loves me, and I love him just as much. It’s my chance to build a family. Please.”
The family I’ve always kept her from. She doesn’t say it, I don’t know if she even thinks it, but I feel the words in my bones.
“Please, Thea. Can you support me?”
I swallow thickly. “Of course.”
The serious expression melts from her face, transforming into a wild glee as she stands so quickly her chair teeters on its back legs.
“Thank you, Tia!” she squeals, throwing her arms around me.
And just like that, we’re back to solid ground. She always did forgive me too easily.
“You’re working, so I won’t go through it all now, but I’m going to need your help as my maid of honor. It’ll be nuts trying to get this all sorted out in the next month.”
My knees buckle, and I drop into the seat across from her. “A month?”
She glances down at me, her head tilting to the side. “Didn’t I mention that?”
“No, Adelaide,” I say, and she scowls at the use of her full name. “You did not mention that you were marrying the guy you’ve been dating for three months a month from now.”
She shrugs.
I barely hold back my scream. If I’m going to help her realize her plan is fucking bonkers, I need to find another approach.
“Why?” I ask, forcing a level of nonchalance into my voice to keep her defenses from going up again. “Your wedding should be perfect, and we’ll have so much fun taking our time to make it exactly what you want.”
“His family has a vineyard in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The mountains, Tia! Our whole lives we’ve talked about running away to the mountains. It’s a sign from the universe, right?”
The first time in her life Addy has played into anything even approaching New Age thinking, and it’s making her run off and marry a guy she’s just started dating. Great. Of course she couldn’t start with something small, like an interest in crystals.
“They host weddings, and they had a last-minute cancellation. Pretty much everyone except his immediate family lives up there, and I only have you and the Fischers”—I can’t hold back my flinch this time, though I don’t think she notices—“so it makes sense to go there. Plus, it’s special. He spent his summers there with his cousins and brother. You’re going to be shocked by how beautiful it is.”
I’ve been to the Blue Ridge Mountains, but she doesn’t know that.
Addy was a sophomore in college when I got hit with the world’s worst string of luck. I kept it quiet because I didn’t need her swooping in when she should have been focusing on school.
But a girl’s gotta eat. So when my best friend came to me with the opportunity to make a little money by pretending to be his other friend’s girlfriend, it was an easy call. I knew his friend—Owen—had to be a good guy because Vaughn wouldn’t put me in a dangerous position. So up Owen and I flew to North Carolina and spent the weekend pretending we were wildly in love to keep his family off his back. I walked away with several months’ rent and the relief that I wouldn’t have to ask my baby sister, who had been saving for school since she was old enough to realize it was a thing, to give me some of her college fund.
And then, I have a horrifying thought. A family in our small town with a vineyard in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Owen had a little brother. Shit, I can’t remember his name. It’s a big mountain range, but the similarities are too many to ignore.
“Addy,” I start as the acid in my stomach churns and I fight the urge to throw up. “What’s Harrison’s last name?”
“Hayes. Why?”
I hold in the breath of relief as the nausea fades. That isn’t Owen’s last name. It’s a bizarre coincidence, but at least I won’t have to come clean about what we did or make a scene at her wedding.
I shake my head dismissively, and she watches me, her face pinching. She has the same strong, dark brows and thick brown hair as our mother. With her lightly tanned skin, she’d fit right in with the Greek family that gave us our last name, even if we have no real connection to any of them. I, on the other hand, inherited my father’s bright blond hair, or so my mother said when I was little. I remember resenting that Addy looks so much like Mom when I only got her dark brown eyes. I spent hours staring in the mirror after she died, like it was a portal to the next life, and if my gaze didn’t stray it would actually be her looking back.
Addy’s lips purse, and I know she’s chewing on the inside of her mouth, a tell she’s had since childhood.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
She immediately stops, then sighs. “I just want it all to be perfect. He has this giant extended family, and I haven’t met them yet. What if they don’t like me?” Her voice lowers to a whisper. “What if I lose him?”
I know where the fear stems from. It was all those families over the years who told us they couldn’t afford to keep us, or handle the work of keeping us, or just straight up didn’t want to keep us.
But what she doesn’t realize—or never admits out loud—is that she was never the problem. Addy was smart, well-behaved, rational to the point of unemotional. I drove away every family stable enough to keep us long-term, and since the Florida foster system doesn’t separate siblings except in extreme cases, I dragged her right along with me.
I won’t cost her another family.
“How could anyone not love you?” I ask.
Her lips pinch again. “His mom doesn’t.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“She … I don’t know how to explain it. She just kind of ignores me. I can’t break through. This is my chance to change all that. We’ll have a week in North Carolina to prepare wedding stuff and you can help me win her over. You’ll be there? Right?”
My stomach churns over the idea of being away for a week. This isn’t like Addy’s cushy salaried job with paid time off, but she’s looking at me with so much desperation that I already know I’ll take extra shifts over the next few weeks to make it work.
“I’ll be with you the whole time. It’ll be perfect. I won’t let it be any other way.”
Tears fill her eyes. “Promise?”
“Yes. No one can stop the Pappas sisters, right?”
Addy kindly doesn’t correct me, even though we both know the invitation will say Adelaide Fischer, not Adelaide Pappas.
She hooks her pinky through mine and lets out a relieved breath.
“Pappas,” a loud voice echoes through the restaurant, making patrons jump. I jump, too, flying out of my seat. This time, the chair does tip over, smacking into the back of another patron’s chair and earning me a scowl over her shoulder.
My boss, Gordon, barrels over. “My office. Now.”
I glance around at my colleagues, who quickly avert their gazes. Addy grabs my hand but I pull away, giving her a shaky smile before following Gordon.
Copyright © 2026 by Amy Barber