Olivia turned, held up the key fob, and pressed LOCK. The car beeped behind Chase. “Let’s just eat, okay?”
“Why can’t you be a regular person for a few minutes? You want me to share shit with you”—Chase stomped behind her, still peeved that the woman was such an effing robot—“but you shut down when I ask a simple question. How can I trust you if you can’t trust me with a fact?”
Olivia stopped and turned to Chase.
“Trust you? You’re a flight risk, an unwilling participant in—” She waved her hand. “In all this. Why would I tell you any intimate detail of my life? You aren’t committed to anything we’ve been doing. You stonewall me at every turn, refuse to even try. Everyone in your life wants you to get better . . . but you. If you can’t at least pick up the reins, you’ll go nowhere, and to date, you’re still sitting on your horse refusing to move.”
“No, I’m here with you, and since that day I ran, I’ve done what was required of me.”
“Begrudgingly.”
“Yeah, begrudgingly. I don’t know you. That’s what the truth-or-dare bullshit was about. We have to spend time together, and I thought we could converse like real people and not like I’m required to do with you as part of ‘Square One.’” She hooked her fingers dramatically in the air. “I asked you a question. Yeah, it was personal, but not really.”
Olivia moved toward her, stepping into Chase’s comfort zone, staring her right in the eye. Olivia’s brown eyes were resolute, her mouth a tight line. “My sister died from a drug overdose. I found her in a motel room. Happy now?”
Chase blinked but managed to recover from that punch in the gut. She’d expected her sister had died in a car accident or a weird childhood disease. Not from addiction. And Olivia had been the one to find her sister dead? Perhaps this explained why Olivia did what she did. “I’m sorry.”
Olivia swallowed. Hard. “Me too.”
Chase nodded and brushed past Olivia, heading toward the restaurant steps. A couple had just emerged and carried a Styrofoam container. They looked at Chase curiously before stopping to study a sign advertising a concert. On the other side of the porch, a trio of motorcycles roared up. Sensing that Olivia was not behind her, Chase turned around. “Are you coming?”
Olivia nodded but didn’t move.
“Come on. I’ll share the onion rings with you, and I’ll even let you off on the whole fake orgasm thing. I bet you couldn’t do it right anyway.”
Olivia shouldered her purse and walked up the steps. “I can. I’m good at faking.”
And that made Chase smile. Because the two of them were nothing alike, but they had that in common.
They were both good at faking.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Her grandparents’ place was not the cozy, large cabin Olivia remembered. Of course, nothing is ever as one remembers from childhood. Her memories of the rustic two-story cabin nestled at the base of Mount Larsen a few hundred feet from Cotter’s Creek would always be tinged by the scent of spruce, smudged with woodsmoke, and framed by inky skies full of stars scattered like celestial confetti. Those memories were wrapped in Band-Aids, sticky marshmallow, and ghost stories told while tucked tight beneath a quilt in the lofted beds she shared with her sisters. If she listened close enough to the ghosts of her past, she could catch hold of her sisters’ giggles, her mother singing Aerosmith in the kitchen, and her grandfather listening to NPR on the old entertainment console radio.