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showing more leg and cleavage than the showgirls on the strip. I’m tempted to call Lizzy and see if she has a dress I can borrow, but Will’s going to be here any minute, so there’s no time for that.
    Someone squeezes my hand, and I look down to see Gabby giving me a half smile. I don’t know if I’ve seen her smile all-out since Mom died. I miss her smile. I miss the sound of her voice.
    Reaching onto her tiptoes and behind my head, she pulls the hair tie from the base of my neck so my long, dark hair falls free, then she places her hand against my cheek and nods her approval. She might not be talking, but most days she communicates with me one hundred times better than Drew does.
    I pull Gabby into a hug and take in the sweet bubblegum scent of her hair. When I release her, Drew is staring at us and, for the split second before she can hide it again, there’s sadness in her eyes.
    “You sure you guys will be okay?” I ask.
    Gabby squeezes my hand, and Drew nods, averting her eyes. “You deserve to have a little fun too.”
    My breath catches with surprise, and that need to cry is back. Damn it. I shove it down. “Thank you.”
    Drew lifts a shoulder. “I can tell you like him. Anyway, he’s hot.”
    I grab a pillow and throw it at her. “Hot and too old for you!”
    She laughs and throws it back at me. “Yeah, but which one of us is going to be living here?”
    “I don’t care how hot he is, if he touched you, I’d cut off his balls.”
    Something flickers in her eyes, a secret caught peeking from the hidden corner of her mind. Even though I haven’t lived under the same roof as the girls since I was sixteen, I’ve remained their primary breadwinner and been involved in their lives. My role as surrogate mother isn’t a new one. And yet there’s so much I don’t know about her. I want to fix that, but there’s a rift between us that I don’t know I can heal from a distance.
    From the outside looking in, people are probably most worried about Gabby. But me? It’s Drew who keeps me up at night. Gabby’s going to be okay. I believe that. But Drew is just old enough that she can really get herself in trouble if that’s what she wants to do.
    I swallow hard, pushing back the fear and sadness and locking it away for another time. “I’m going to wait outside. Slide the deadbolt and the chain behind me. I’ll text you when I get back, and you can let me in.”
    Drew nods and pops her earbuds back in, and Gabby blows me a kiss.
    I push myself out the door before I can change my mind and I’m greeted by a night of glittering stars. The stars in New Hope are brighter and more plentiful than anywhere else I’ve ever been. When I was a little girl, I would look out my bedroom window each night and pick my favorite one and only then would I make a wish. My father taught me to believe in the magic of wishes and destiny, and I was such an adoring daughter that his words were my scripture and the starry night sky became my temple.
    When we moved to Vegas, Drew was eight, and she told my mom she felt sorry for people who lived there because weren’t enough stars to go around. Mom laughed and said you don’t need stars when your wishes had already come true.
    She thought Rick was her wish come true. That was why she took us there, away from my dad, away from New Hope. She met some guy online, hooked up with him a few times while telling Dad she had to travel for “trainings” for work. Then she served her husband with divorce papers and took her daughters to live with a complete stranger who she thought was her everything.
    We were there less than a month before she realized Rick wasn’t the man she thought he was. He was a controlling drunk who liked to put his hands on my mom and sometimes me and the girls. We left his million-dollar home and found ourselves a couple of rent checks away from eviction and a homeless shelter, but it was the right decision. For all the mistakes Mom made, for all the