I guess that’s supposed to be good news. My stomach dips when I realize it isn’t.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Solange

After a delicious buffet-style dinner courtesy of the tias, the family’s sitting around the dinner table drinking cafezinhos and eating Tia Mariana’s house-famous flan.

Cousin Cláudia lifts her plate to her nose and sniffs the dessert before trying it. “Do you serve the pudim at the store?”

“No,” Tia Mariana says, beaming. “We thought about it, but I make it for the kids. It’s my special gift to them.”

By “kids,” she means Lina, Rey, Natalia, and me, and I never realized until now that she kept her flan off the menu because she didn’t want to share it with anyone else. I feel a pang in my chest remembering the many ways the tias have showered us with affection over the years.

“I think that’s smart,” Cláudia says. “It’s good for home but maybe not the right thing to sell.”

Jesus, Cláudia needs better manners. If she makes one more judgy comment tonight, I’ll slap a muzzle on her myself. It’s not even that she’s said any one jaw-dropping thing. No, she’s doing that shit I despise: dishing out insults by a thousand tiny paper cuts. I relax the muscles of my face into a blank expression and look across the table at Lina. She’s in neutral mode too, her head tilted as she stares back at me.

Are you hearing this? I ask with my eyes.

Lina shakes her head ever so slightly, as if to warn me to let it go. She knows the tias wouldn’t want to start a squabble, so she’s not inclined to engage. Natalia, the person most likely to raise a ruckus, is resting at home. Tia Viviane, the second most likely person to raise a ruckus, is spending the night there to help the new parents. The upshot: I’m seething alone.

Max and Rey, meanwhile, can’t seem to get enough of the flan; Max is hunched over his plate as if he’s feeding from a trough, and Rey’s licking the caramel sauce off his spoon.

“This is so good,” Max tells Tia Mariana. “I’d eat this any day.”

“Thank you, filho,” she says proudly. “I’m glad you like it.”

Beside me, Dean squeezes my hand, then leans over to whisper in my ear. “We’re almost done here. You’re doing great.”

Those few words say so much. He’s not oblivious to Cláudia’s occasional jabs, and he recognizes that I’m trying not to make a scene. I can’t recall any other boyfriend being this attuned to me, and Dean’s only faking the role. I squeeze his hand back. “From your lips . . .”