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I nibble my bottom lip to stop myself from asking the question on the tip of my tongue, but the words want to come out too badly. “Do you really think so?”

“Oh my gosh! I thought you’d never ask,” Coco says. “As soon as your names were announced for the competition, I knew it was meant to be. I can just see you together—and the pottery challenge?”

“Swoon,” Rowe says.

“Double swoon. There was so much heat between you I almost called Stone and told him to come over to the house.”

I giggle. “You’re not serious.”

My friends exchange a look.

“You are serious.”

“Ever since the county fair, we’ve been dying to get you alone.” Coco grabs the crib’s railing so tightly her knuckles become white. “Is the chemistry between you as hot as it looks on the live streams? I mean, I almost died during the trust bridge.”

“Yes,” Rowe seconds. “The trust bridge. When he said”—they both say in unison—“‘Do you trust me?’”

“I screamed,” Coco admits.

“I might have, too,” Rowe adds.

“That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.” I remember how my knees shook, how my hands trembled as I slowly made my way to Rhett.

“It was the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.” Coco drops her elbows on the railing and props her face in her hands. “So when’s the big day?”

A laugh rips from my throat. “Don’t y’all think you’re getting ahead of yourselves?”

Rowe says to Coco, “Do you think so?”

“Getting ahead of ourselves?”

“Nah,” they say together.

“It’s still pretty early,” I remind them.

Coco sweeps her hand over her head as if she’s conjuring the words from thin air. “But you two are fated.”

“It’s destiny,” Rowe adds.

“What’s destiny?”

Natalie appears in the doorway, covered head to toe in dirt. She’s about eleven or twelve and is way too smart for her young age. She once convinced her mother’s pilot to fly her to Mystic Meadows so she could see Pane.

The problem was, no one knew where she’d gone, so the family thought she’d been kidnapped. Pane found her at Sparkle Bar playing poker and swindling the locals out of their hard-earned cash, which was their own fault for taking on a tween in a card game.

“It’s destiny,” Rowe says, answering her question, “that you get a bath. It looks like you’ve been rolling dirt.”

“Close,” Natalie replies. “More like the piggycorn pen.”

Rowe tsks. “Bad enough. Let’s go, young lady.”

“Aw, do I have to?”

“You have to.”

Rowe shoots us a smile as she leads Natalie to the bathroom, and Coco heads out of the nursery. I follow, taking one last look at the painted walls.

If things work out with Rhett, this could be me one day.