“Well,” Eve said, faintly stunned. “My. Goodness.”

“I never,” Alex said dryly, “should’ve let you open the rosé.”

“I, er . . . I don’t receive many instant offers of best friendship,” Eve admitted.

“Then you really must take this one,” Tessa said reasonably.

Eve found herself smiling. “Yes, I suppose I must.”

Chapter Seventeen

Mont’s pub, the Rose and Crown, was a cozy mixture of dark wood and green velvet that seemed infinitely suited to the Lake District, and to Montrose himself. Eve spotted him as soon as she entered arm in arm with the twins; he was pouring a glass of gin with a practiced air while chatting to a grizzled customer who looked alarmingly like some sort of biker.

“Mont’s cute, don’t you think?” Tessa said over the speakers’ frantic cascade of “From the Ritz to the Rubble.”

Eve blinked, caught unawares. “Erm . . . weren’t we just talking about macramé?”

Alex rolled her eyes. “Tess thinks that if you ask people unexpected questions they’ll get confused and tell the truth.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, your brother is cute.”

“Perfect,” Tess beamed. “Want to date him?”

“No, she doesn’t want to date him, genius,” Alex interjected. “Anyway, we’re supposed to be bonding. No man-talk. It’s boring.”

Tessa gave a mournful sigh. “Fine. Fine! Come on. Eve, lemon or lime?”

Eve wrinkled her nose as they approached the bar. “You need to be more specific. In general? In drinks? Appearance-wise? As the base flavor for a citrus drizzle cake?”

“Oh my God, all of those.”

“Okay, well, lemon is better in drinks—sharper. Limes look more interesting. But lemon goes better in cake, unless it’s cheesecake.”

“Best color for a Suzuki GSX?” Alex asked.

“I have no idea what a Suzuki is, but I’m going to say lime.”

“Amazing,” Alex said. “You don’t even know what you’re saying and you’re saying everything right.”

Eve laughed, feeling strangely . . . light. She’d never been in this situation, the kind where you met new people with the aim of making friends, yet didn’t experience the crushing weight of self-consciousness. With everyone except her sisters, she felt a slight pressure to perform, to hide away the most annoying parts of herself in order to be liked.

But she hadn’t bothered to do that with Jacob, because she hadn’t wanted him to like her, at first. So maybe now she was out of the habit, and she was forgetting to do it with the twins. Or maybe she simply wasn’t as worried about being annoying anymore, because she hadn’t annoyed herself in quite a while.

Here in Skybriar, there was no pandering to friends who found her more useful than lovable. No whining about mistakes she hadn’t bothered to fix in her journal. No avoiding her parents’ disappointed stares, pretending she couldn’t see them or didn’t deserve it. No wriggling out of the first difficulty she encountered. These days, Eve felt like someone who kept going, and she liked that someone, so she didn’t care quite as much if everyone else liked her, too.