Now it was Jenna’s turn to roll her eyes. “Everyone else is talking about the new hot guy in town, and you’re over here in the corner writing in your journal.”

“Hot guys come and go.”

Jenna laughed. “Yeah? How long has it been since you’ve had a hot guy in your life, or any guy at all?”

Piper looked across the bar to where Ryland was currently chatting it up with not one but two women. Her ex was apparently making up for lost time.

“And whose fault is that?” Jenna asked, reading her mind. “You dumped him last year for no reason, remember?”

Actually, she’d had a really good reason, but it wasn’t one she wanted to share, so she shrugged.

“What you need is a distraction. Of the sexy kind,” Jenna said. “You carry that journal around like it’s the love of your life.”

“At the moment, it is.”

“You could do a whole lot better.” Swiveling her barstool, Jenna eyed the crowd.

“Don’t even think about it,” Piper said.

“About what?”

“You know what. Fixing me up.”

“And would that be so bad?” Jenna set a hand on Piper’s writing arm. “You’re the one always fixing everyone’s life, everyone’s but your own, of course. But even the Fixer needs help sometimes.”

It was true that she’d gone a whole bunch of years now being the one to keep it all together. For everyone. Asking for help wasn’t a part of her DNA. But Jenna did have a point. Today was her birthday, a milestone birthday at that, so she should do at least one frivolous thing, right? She turned the page of her journal and glanced at her secret bucket list.

• Take a cruise to Alaska.
• Get some “me” time every day.
• Learn to knit.
• Buy shoes that aren’t nursing shoes.

“Okay, no,” Jenna said. “You’re not sitting at your birthday party eyeing a list about buying nursing shoes.”

“About not buying nursing shoes,” Piper corrected. “And this isn’t my party.”

“It’s your party. And if you’d told Gavin and Winnie about it, they’d be here helping you celebrate too.”

Just what she needed, to give her twenty-seven-going-on-seventeen-year-old brother and her not-quite-legal-to-drink sister a reason to party. “I told them not to come. Gavin’s busy at his job in Phoenix, and Winnie’s working hard on her grades at UCSB.”

“They’re lucky to have you, I hope they know that,” Jenna said genuinely. “Look, you work so hard keeping all of you going. But today, at the very least, you should have some fun.”

“I hear you. But keep that in mind.” She pointed to the sign hanging above the bar:

WARNING:

ALCOHOL MAY MAKE THE PEOPLE IN THIS PLACE APPEAR BETTER-LOOKING THAN THEY REALLY ARE.