Everything I’ve been avoiding slams back into me. It’s like falling off a horse into a pile of wooden spikes. The orange grove. The kiss. The way she looked at me and I knew. We both knew. I could never have the one thing I wanted most of all.

“Kiki can go to hell.”

I brush past Alejandro, stumbling a bit as I dodge the hand he reaches out to me with. I meant what I said. She can go to hell. Alejandro can go to hell. That entire family can go to hell. They were never mine anyway. None of it ever will be mine.

“Ana!”

My feet are not as nimble as they are when I’m sober. I trip over my own boots and nearly fall right into the roaring fireplace. It is only Alejandro’s strong hands that save me. He pulls me away from the fire and steers me toward a seat currently occupied by one of Esmeralda’s girls and the two lovestruck buffoons fawning all over her.

“Move,” Ale tells them.

They look disgruntled, but there is something in Alejandro’s voice that makes them obey. He sits me down and follows, patting my knee as I wait for the room to stop spinning.

“I wouldn’t fret too much about this whole Sebastian thing,” he says.

This whole Sebastian thing. That’s a hell of a way to sum up the worst thing to happen to me.

I scoff, which is maybe a mistake, since it makes bile rise up in my throat. If I throw up on Esmeralda’s carpet, I will never hear the end of it. I swallow. “I’ll fret if I damn well please.”

“I’m just saying.” Alejandro holds up his hands in a beseeching gesture. “I think it’ll take wild horses to drag my sister down that aisle to marry someone she doesn’t love.”

“But she has to.”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

I squint at him. Partially to focus my blurry vision but also to show my suspicion. “What do you know that I don’t?”

Alejandro presses his lips together, as if weighing his next words. But then he huffs a determined little breath and says, “For one, I know that her heart belongs to someone else.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“You.” He knocks his shoulder into mine in a brotherly gesture.

I look away sharply. He is saying things out loud that were never meant to be said. “We Sonzas are a stubborn lot. When we love, we love with our whole hearts. And when we make up our minds about who we love, that’s it. No one can convince us otherwise.”

In his words, I sense an opportunity to shift the focus onto him. “Are you saying there’s someone you love? And who actually loves you back?”

He presses his finger against his lips. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”