“You eat onion rings?”

Olivia smiled. “Almost never. But we can split an order so you can try them . . . and I’ll worry about the calories later. If they’re as good as they once were, it will be worth every one of them.”

“How many sisters do you have?” Chase asked, noting the wistfulness in Olivia’s voice. Chase’s parents divorced when she was three years old, and thus she’d never truly had a sibling. Her father had remarried a twentysomething nubile dancer who’d given him two kids before her father drove his car into the canyon, drunk as a skunk. She knew their names were Meryn and Willa. They lived in Vegas, and she’d met them only once at his funeral, so she had no nostalgia for two kids she barely knew, but it was obvious that her new therapist had good memories of her siblings.

“I had two. Now just one.” Olivia unclicked her seat belt, her expression shuttering. The woman didn’t want to talk about her sisters. That much was certain.

“What happened to the other one? Is she dead?” Chase persisted.

Olivia made a face as she opened the car door. “Yeah. She’s dead.”

Chase didn’t make a move to climb from the car. Olivia turned. “Are you coming?”

Something in Olivia’s face before she retreated behind her normal, placid mask of control intrigued Chase. Lots to unpack in that look, but mostly, Chase had glimpsed immense sadness.

People often didn’t understand that the best actors were empaths who could decipher in small reactions the truth of a person. On the outside, Olivia presented herself as a very knowledgeable, confident therapist, but Chase was almost certain that beneath her carefully cultivated professional demeanor was a woman who wasn’t so far away from who Chase was. “How did she die?”

Olivia sighed. “Chase, I don’t want to talk about my sisters.”

“I do.”

“You don’t get to make those kinds of demands. That’s my personal life, and it’s not accessible to you.”

“But mine is? You want me to trust that you have my best interests at heart. You want me to tell you why I can’t get off when I’m with a guy. You want me to vomit out the crap that happened to me when I was a child, shit that would make a stone-cold gangster cry, but you won’t give me anything? It’s a fact, isn’t it?”

Olivia narrowed her eyes. “What is?”

“How your sister died. That’s a fact. Not an emotion.”

Olivia slammed the car door and started walking toward the restaurant.

Her response felt like a slap in Chase’s face. God, she was trying to connect here, and Olivia was being a total bitch. Okay, so maybe whatever happened to her sister was upsetting. She understood traumatic death—didn’t her own father have to have a closed casket because he’d essentially smashed himself to pieces? But that didn’t mean Olivia had to be so effing rude.

Chase unclicked her seat belt and climbed from the car. “What’s your problem?”