Which she needed right now, because she’d just found out one of her favorite ways to get out of the house was closing down and there was nothing that she could do about it. Daniella pulled up the emergency brake and shifted the gear into first before turning off the throaty, muscly engine. Daniella started thinking how she liked her cars the way she liked her boys, but that felt like too obvious a piece of humor this early in the morning, so she buried the joke down deep and didn’t laugh.

Daniella pulled the strap to her tan leather satchel over her shoulder and pulled the bag and herself out of the car. The bag snagged for a moment on the gearbox and then the e-brake, but Daniella kept pulling, kept using momentum to get everything out in one solid swing.

The satchel came to an abrupt stop against Daniella’s hip, but she wasn’t thrown off balance by it. The thwack against her leg was grounding, if anything. She was here, in this body, in this incomprehensible life.

Daniella took a deep breath, trying to keep a wave of nausea at bay. She’d thrown on a pair of cutoff black denim shorts, some Docs, and a worn-in, soft T-shirt that read Visit Crete, complete with a cartoon of a minotaur on it. And this wasn’t from a quick road trip through Crete, Illinois. This was from actual international travel. Yia-yia had brought it back for Daniella when she and Mom went back to the motherland for a trip without Daniella or any of her siblings.

These were her favorite, threadbare clothes, and she needed that when she had to deal with a hangover. She opened the front flap of her bag and began digging through, past her notebook—her secret notebook, leather-bound in black—trying to find her keys to the front door of Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium. She was the only high school employee with her own set. And they were nearly all high school employees. For reasons that were beyond Daniella’s comprehension, the only employee at Wild Nights who was an adult with a master’s degree was the manager, Jo.

Actually, Jo was the only adult, full stop.

Even Rinn Olivera didn’t get a set of keys. At least Daniella would always have that.

Wild Nights Bookstore was still closing, though. Daniella took another deep breath because she was not going to throw up and she was not going to cry. She was also not going to tell anyone. She’d promised Eli she wouldn’t.

She was going to handle herself, and she was going to open the damned store.

But her mind was still screaming. Wild Nights was closing, was closing, was closing.

Daniella didn’t know how she was going to make it through the morning without telling anyone. Luckily, she was opening the store, which typically gave her time to think.