ANOTHER BIRTHDAY. Another year where my life feels as messy as it always does.
“Make a wish,” Avery whispers across the table, her eyes budding with anticipation. She looks from the gold-foil candles on my chocolate ganache cake and back to me.
I search my mind for anything I could wish for right now but come up short. I’m in Europe with my best friend, her husband, and the man who has been hacking away at the cage surrounding my heart.
What more can I need?
My freshly manicured nails twirl the gift from Nico, a diamond and purple sapphire tennis bracelet that matches the tattered friendship bracelet from Rio. He put it on my wrist this morning after he sang me a cute birthday song in Spanish.
Everything has been near perfect, from the gift to the hours spent lounging by the pool and stuffing ourselves with fruit to the extravagant dinner tonight.
But my time has expired. This evening, I have to confess to Avery about the blog, the books, and the plagiarism. I have to tell my best friend that I’m Zoe Mona.
Sure, it’s my fault for waiting until the last night of our trip to tell her everything, but it doesn’t dull the pain of anticipation.
The candles stare back at me. My friends—no, my family—patiently wait for me to extinguish the flames. I keep a smile plastered on my face, pretending to conjure up something extraordinary. Instead, my thoughts creak like an old scale, trying to balance two things.
Hurting Avery. Hurting Nico.
So I blow out my candles and ask for the only thing I can think of right now.
No more secrets.
Nico brushes his fingers over my bare thigh. “What did you wish for?” “Are you a rookie? If I tell you, then my wish won’t come true.” I
mimic his words from a few months ago.
Time feels impossibly liquid in my mind.
Avery claps as her husband looks at her with so much love, it’s almost potent enough to taste. They pass around slices of cake, and we dive our forks into the goodness.
“One final beach visit?” I ask the table when our glasses and dessert plates sit empty.
“Yes, the stars look stunning from here.” My best friend pushes out of her chair, an elegant peach dress rippling around her sun-kissed skin.
“You two go ahead,” Nico says. “Luca and I will hang back.”
Nico winks at me, giving a small squeeze around my fingers as a sign of support, before flashing his brother a knowing look. A moment of privacy for Avery and me.
It takes a few minutes to make it down the stone path to the shoreline, where we shuck off our heels. Waves crash against the beach, and the glow of a full moon dances across the water.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, but with Nico around, I figured it’s best to do it when we’re alone.” She wraps her arm around mine as we stroll in the sand. “Did you get your annual asshole text?”
Every year, as if I’m trapped in some annual Groundhog Day, I get a message from Chuck on my birthday. The same eight words sit in a graveyard of ignored messages.
NEVER FUCKING ANSWER
Happy Birthday, Little Lily. Still think about you.
I nod. “While we were at lunch. Like clockwork.” “You should block his number.”
“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of winning.” The moment the delivered notification stops hitting his end of the one-sided text conversation, he’ll piece together that he got under my skin.
“There’s nothing to win, Lily. He’s the loser. He lost,” Avery reminds me, but it’s more honesty than I can accept. “What did Nico think of the text?”
“Nothing. I didn’t show him.”
A heavy sigh draws out of her, and I know I’m about to hear something I don’t really want to. “Lil, I know you can see Nico looks at you the way Luca looks at me.”
“All men look at me that way.”
“No. Not like that. I’ve seen guys trip up around you, sometimes even do things that border on harassment.” I grin despite the severity of the conversation. “But you’ve never mirrored them. Never really glanced their way, refilled their cup, or laughed at every single joke despite how wildly inappropriate it is. It’s different with Nico.”
She’s right, as always.
Maintaining a friendship with someone who’s innately so much like yourself is almost frustrating. Where Avery is soft, I’m clad in stone, but everything in between has been my most rewarding and familiar relationship.
“It would be easier if we remained friends.” Because I can manage a friendship. It doesn’t come with strings that yank, tug, and pull on every inch of your rusted heart, somehow lifting you up and dragging you down all at once.
“Lil, you have matching tattoos.” “Hey, he stole my design.”
She knows it’s not the truth because that’s how friends work. They know everything about you—exactly like Nico.
“I don’t believe you, so you can stop lying. Besides, not too long ago, you sat me down and told me I deserved to be happy.”
“Actually, all I said was that you needed to get laid.” My elbow sends a slight nudge into her arm. “You and Luca took it to a whole other level.” I drop my eyes to the barely there bump on her belly.
“If you know, you know.” One of her brows quirks up, and she shrugs. “Everything else ceases to matter when you find someone who doesn’t love you in spite of your flaws but because of them.”
“I promise, Ave. I’m happier this way,” I lie again, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Let’s not talk about boys right now. I actually have something to tell you.”
Avery turns to me, her eyes lit by the night sky. She searches my face for any indication of what I’m about to say.
Now or never.
“You know all those novellas that were in our apartment? The sexy ones you refused to read.”
She blushes. “I didn’t refuse to read them. They’re just very explicit.” “Right.” I swallow a tight breath. “Well, they’re mine.”
“I know. The Zoe Mona ones! I have some at the beach house. Eloisa likes to read them when she and Oscar come to visit.” Oh boy. The Navarro family has read about me getting fucked. Fun. I’ll have to deal with that reality later. “Did you want your copies back?”
“No. Um, not what I meant.” Avery frowns.
“I wrote them.”
My best friend stares at me, a cloak of emptiness covering her face. A beat passes, then another. I’m concerned I’ve stepped in a sinking sand patch from how small I feel next to her.
“What?” Avery finally speaks.
“Yeah, they’re mine. I started a blog and over the years, it became popular. The novellas came shortly after we moved to New York together. But listen, Ave.” I grasp her limp hand in mine. “I wanted to tell you so many times. There was just never a right moment. Keeping this whole other identity from you was torturous until, honestly, it wasn’t, and then so much time passed, I…”
“A blog?”
“Yes. The night I ended things with Chuck, I made my first post. It was reckless. A plan to make sure I spent my twenties never being humiliated by another man again. It’s almost embarrassing. I made up these silly rules for how I’d avoid getting hurt, and eventually, it became an outlet for my writing, like an online journal.”
The truth comes out easily, but the reality of hearing it out loud hurts more than I expected. For the past ten years, I spent every single romantic interaction proving something or simply seeking vindication for the girl I was when I was eighteen. It’s pathetic.
“Now I don’t even want to write any of it anymore,” I say. “The past month, I haven’t picked up my laptop or chased the takedown of a slimy jerk all summer.”
Avery stares at me again. “Does anyone else know?”
My hand tightens around hers. “Nico figured it out a few weeks into our trip.”
“Okay.”
Alright, I definitely wanted her to get mad or yell at me. Anything would be better than the blank expression in her eyes. My blood screeches in my veins as though I’m helpless while stuck in a rogue elevator, dropping from the hundredth floor.
“Look, the novellas were some extra income to help pay for school, and all of it would’ve just remained buried if I hadn’t somehow written an international bestseller, but my shithead professor plagiarized my work, and now there may be a lawsuit. I also have enough money to finish my degree full-time, and it’s all just a lot—”
“A bestseller?”
Of course, that’s what she pulled out of my incoherent ramble.
“Yeah. The book is called Coastal Fling. I wrote it in Montauk last summer. It’s about Nico. Don’t tell him I just admitted that. He’ll never let me live it down.” I try for a smile. She doesn’t imitate it.
“My best friend is a bestselling author?” I nod. “Are you mad?”
“I—I’m mad—”
“Avery, I’m so sorry.”
“How could I not figure it out sooner? Are you kidding me?” Her voice pitches up the way it does when she gets overwhelmed. “Nico pieced it together before I did? We lived together for years, and I never thought anything of it. I just assumed you were obsessed with Zoe Mona the way I was obsessed with ORO.”
A hearty sound comes from the depths of her stomach.
She’s okay.
“You’re not mad?”
“Oh, Lily, I could never, ever be mad at you. If I had an awful first love like Chuck, I’d do something much worse than start a blog to help me get a semblance of myself back.”
“I’m not even sure what to think anymore.”
“What do you mean?” Avery runs her hand over my shoulder, bringing me back to the present.
“With the plagiarism and everything else. I don’t know if I even want to write anymore.”
Something close to my heart was taken and violated. It’s as simple as that. No one should have to shuck off a mask and force it back onto themselves in the face of adversity. Right?
“Wait, fill me in about this plagiarism stuff. Your teacher stole your work? How did that even happen?”
I give her all the details about my creative writing professor appropriating my manuscript, as well as the efforts Nico and I have taken to resolve the situation. Carefully omitting the sleeping in the same bed and copious amounts of sex in between, at least for now.
“That’s awful, Lily. All things considered, I’m thrilled Nico found out. Even if it was before me.” She gives me a soft, sympathetic look. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to weather this by yourself.”
Her words are enough of a slap in the face for me to know I was absolutely wrong for not telling her about everything sooner. She would’ve been nothing but understanding.
Why do I keep letting my fear inflate my doubts?
“Yeah, Nico’s been pretty crucial,” I admit.
Letting him in more and more has felt so complicated, but I don’t know how I would’ve survived the past few weeks without him.
“Have you thought about the fact that maybe you can’t move forward with him—”
Oh no. I know where this is going. “I don’t—”
“Stop.” Avery has a stern look in her hazel eyes. “Maybe you aren’t able to give Nico a chance, despite very obviously having feelings for him, because there’s something inside you keeping the door open for Chuck?”
My stomach sours at the suggestion. “What? No, definitely not,” I respond immediately, giving myself no room to consider the possibility. “Chuck’s influence on my life ended a long, long time ago, Ave. I’ve been done with that asshole for years.”
“I’m not saying you have lingering feelings for him, Lil, but you created a blog—heck, an entire persona—because of what happened with Chuck.” Avery tries to chase the arm I’ve unhooked from her. I pull farther out of reach, feeling like I’ve been dropped onto my own deserted island with no help in sight. “You spent the better part of a decade getting payback against guys who shared a likeness with that bastard. Couldn’t there be the smallest
chance that you aren’t ready to acknowledge what’s happening between you and Nico because of the trust issues still lingering after Chuck?”
Ouch.
I knew the whole no-one-knows-you-better-than-your-best-friend thing was going to bite me in the fucking ass.
Avery’s words ring in my ears like sirens. Maybe a small part of me didn’t want to tell her about Zoe Mona because she would’ve forced me to look at it differently.
In a way, I’ve been ignoring it.
It seems so obvious now. The almost-invisible link between my secret and Chuck, between the line my heart keeps trying to draw toward Nico, but I keep forcing away with a giant eraser.
Why was I so afraid to look at the truth staring me right in the face?
My heart swells in admiration for Avery, who can see me through the darkness. “Why do you have to know me better than I know myself?”
She pulls me into a steadying hug, and I let myself sink into her embrace.
“Because I love you, and you’re my sister, and I want to see you happy, regardless of what it looks like.” Avery untangles herself from me and grins. “But I’m going to need you to break the news to my husband that his mother read stories of your sexcapades with her son.”
I laugh, thankful for the switch in the subject. She can always tell when I need time to process a boulder-sized crush on my reality.
“To be fair, they were fictional sexcapades.” I recall how Nico’s belt strapped me to the balcony in London in the same manner I’d imagined him doing in Coastal Fling. I wrap my hand around my wrist, and my birthday gift meets my fingers. Strong stones and metal clasps. Almost as permanent as our matching tattoos. “Well, they were originally fictional.”
“No, please don’t tell me any more.” She chuckles playfully, placing her hands over her ears even though I know she’ll ask me more about it later. “Wait, if you wrote about your hookups, did the guy in the mob get a story?”
“He wasn’t in the mob. He just frequently piloted planes out of Florida.”
In reality, his parents owned a rare furniture company that I’m pretty sure laundered money. Who could truly know? The Hermès Kelly in my closet doesn’t know how to spill secrets.
“Oh, because that doesn’t seem sketchy at all. Same with the gun strapped to his thigh. That was a prop, huh?”
“Yeah, it was.” I shrug. “I don’t believe you.”
“No, really, it was fake because he shot himself in the foot before, so his
dad took it away and gave him a taser.”
It should’ve been the first red flag, but I entertained another date. He did things with that prop I don’t want to recall.
“You’re a bestselling author because you have the best stories.”
A collection of giggles spreads between us. We work our way back to the heels we abandoned by the stone path leading up to the resort.
“Look,” I begin while reaching for my shoes, “all this stuff with Nico
—”
“Even if nothing works out, though I know you know something’s there,
you don’t owe me an explanation. You’re my family.” Her hands give my shoulders a squeeze. “But now so is Nico. Maybe you can tell him about Chuck and where your heart is right now.”
“Yeah, there’s just a lot going on.”
“That’s true, but there’s always going to be a lot going on. This time, you don’t have to deal with it alone. We’re all here for you.”
As usual, she’s right.
