“Seriously, John, you did all the work of picking them up. Let me at least buy you—Ow!”

Mary winced when Fin landed a swift kick to her ankle. She looked over at her clairvoyant friend and received some very meaningful eye contact. Mary frowned. She couldn’t directly interpret Fin’s wide eyes, high eyebrows, pursed lips, but she had the distinct impression that she wasn’t supposed to be refusing the bills that John stuffed into her hand.

“Will you stay and eat with us, John?” Via asked. “Mary’s gonna close down the shop in a bit and then we can eat.”

“Oh. Ah...” John looked to Mary.

Flustered, John’s money in her hand and at least a half an hour before she normally closed the shop, Mary smoothed her hair again. “Let’s just eat now. You should definitely stay, John. I’ll close the store down early tonight.”

She felt her friends’ eyes on her back as she hurried over to the door, flipped the sign and the lock and dimmed the front lights. Mary ignored their eyes as she pulled out her phone and sent a quick Tweet on the store’s Twitter feed saying that she was closing up a bit early. And by the time she got back to the counter, with everyone leaning over their tacos, her friends were too busy eating to point out that she hadn’t closed the shop early for them, but she had for John.

IT WAS A week later when John finally realized what was happening. He was in the middle of a date with a very nice woman named Tilli, who seemed just as confused about why his mother had set them up as he did.

John got a text from Mary, but he waited until pretty, brown-haired Tilli was in the bathroom to open it.

In their typical way, the text said two words and two words only. A name. Only, this time, it was a name that made John nearly choke on the very life in his throat.

Maddox Whitford.

Another text from her sat below that fateful name. Any relation?

“Yes, there’s a fucking relation,” John muttered angrily to his phone, slouching over it. His mother had set up Mary with Maddox? With his train-wreck half brother, who was just as likely to wind up hungover on a train to Niagara Falls as he was to actually make it into work on any given day? It had been just two months ago that Estrella herself had shaken her head at the Page Six article about his father’s other son, outlining the fall of the drunken, high-society rich kid. And now she was magically deciding that Mary should date this guy?

“What the hell, Ma?”