“If I left here without any, I would be devastated.”

She laughed. “I get that my brother looks like this now, but that wasn’t always true. Nitpicking other people’s clothing choices would have been the least of his worries.”

“He said it,” Jess said, “but I find it hard to believe.”

Pilar bent, scrolling through her phone, quickly locating what she wanted… almost as if she’d put it there for easy access. Jess stared when Pilar turned the screen to face her. “Stop it.” She looked at River and then back at the photo. “That isn’t you.”

A scrawny kid with a bowl haircut and headgear looked out from Pilar’s phone. Searching for any resemblance to her boyfriend, she stared at it long enough for River to laughingly shove the phone away.

“Until he was twenty-one, he had no game to speak of,” Pilar said.

River laughed. “It’s true. But I managed.”

“Yeah, you did,” Natalia said. “I remember in high school there was this football player who was constantly bothering him. Anthony something. River tutored half the class to bring up the curve. Anthony failed and was kicked off the team.”

“That’s called problem solving,” River mumbled into his glass.

“He did the same thing when I ran against Nikki Ruthers for student council,” Pilar said. “He offered group tutoring sessions to everyone who voted for me. I won by a landslide.”

River thoughtfully selected a piece of prosciutto-wrapped grilled endive from a plate. “Longest summer of my life.”

“Okay, that’s actually really sweet,” Jess said, taking his hand under the table and giving it a little squeeze.

“I know it’s hard to imagine with his grumbly exterior, but he was the softest little boy.” Natalia put her hand on Pilar’s arm. “Do you remember the way he followed Abuela around?”

Pilar’s face crumpled into a dramatic tender sob. “And watched her stories with her!”

“Oh man, I did not anticipate this one coming up,” River said.

“I’m two years older than River,” Natalia told Jess, “and Pilar is a year older than me, so he was like our baby, too. Our parents both worked full-time, and back then there’s no way they could have afforded summer camp for all three kids, so our summers were spent with Abuela. River was her little helper, and every afternoon they would sit together and watch soap operas.”

River examined the appetizers like they were data sets.

“Closet soap opera fan?” Jess said. “We all have a secret identity, but this? It would be easier to believe you were an assassin.”

“They’re just being dramatic,” he said, and then laughed at her, murmuring, “Assassin? Really?”

“Don’t listen to him, Jess,” Natalia said. “He watched so many of them and got in deep. I thought he’d grow up to be a telenovela star or something, but the whole DNA-love thing makes sense when you think about it.”

Jess turned to look at him and found him watching her with such tender amusement it was almost like he’d just wrapped his arms around her right at the table.