I feel myself blush so hard I must look bright red. “Right, right...”

“So...?”

“Yeah, we’re dating—I mean write that we’re dating.” I blink, trying to focus. This still feels like a dream. I just told him we accused his family wrongfully, and he still wants to team up with me?! “Are you serious about entering the contest with me? What about your mother and grandfather?”

“I haven’t been more serious in my entire life. Mom is too worried about Grandpa’s health to consider anything like this, and Grandpa is sick, so I can’t ask him. I have a feeling he wouldn’t trust me enough to be his partner, anyway...” He offers me a sad smile. “But now that we can’t cater anymore, Sugar is in trouble. I need to do something. I have to do this for my family, and there’s no one I’d trust to enter this contest with more than you. You’re fighting for your home, too. You’re the only one who understands the way I feel now.”

My heart aches for him. He’s only seventeen. He shouldn’t have to feel the weight of running his family’s business.

“We’ll win,” I say, and deep down I try to convince myself, too. “And when we do, Salt and Sugar will be safe.”

Pedro stares at me for a moment. “Lari, you’d tell me, right?”

My heart skips a beat. It’s the first time he’s called me by my nickname. “Tell you what?”

“If your mom decides to sell Salt now that things are falling apart. Remember our original truce? The deadline for the Deals Deals offer is in two weeks. We have to stop our mothers if they begin to cave, okay? This contest will be for nothing if one of them decides to take the offer.”

I open my mouth to tell him that Mom still has that lawyer’s business card, when our mothers’ raised voices outside the store make us jump.

For a terrifying minute, I’m sure Mom has followed me and sees who I’m talking to. Pedro looks just as startled.

But it’s just the feud. Our mothers are yelling simply because they’ve crossed paths on the sidewalk and don’t have the catering gig to force them to coexist anymore.

“I should never have worked with someone like you! You didn’t know the first thing about party planning! You’re ruining Sugar’s reputation with your incompetence and I know you must have said something to Dona Fernanda’s daughter to get me fired! She was perfectly fine with Sugar catering alone for her birthday before you went and ruined everything!” Dona Eulalia accuses Mom. “Now she’s not even answering my calls! What did you do, Alice? Tell me!”