He glares at me as if I’m not apologizing enough.

“When it comes to the details of my life, Chase, you’re hardly a master code cracker. You barely show interest.”

“Hey, don’t turn this around. Whenever I ask about your past, I get one-word answers and shrugs. And besides, I’m not mad that she’s here. She’s your sister, after all. She’s family.” His jaw clenches. “I just want to know who I’m welcoming into my house.”

“Excuse me?”

“Our house.” He sighs. “You’ve always said your sister was serious trouble. So is she or isn’t she?”

“Why don’t you decide? You’re the one who invited her in for dinner.” I stamp my pants to the ground and leave them there.

“I was trying to be nice! I didn’t know what to do. You weren’t offering many cues as to how I should act.” He lets out a deep breath, turns back the duvet for me, and I slip under it. When he speaks again, his voice is gentle. “Look, I know this is all a shock. Let’s just try to calm down and talk about this sensibly, okay? What I really want to know is why she’s here. Why would she search you out now, when she’s pregnant?”

Chase doesn’t know that he’s playing with fire. How could he?

“We should be careful,” I say, hugging my knees.

Chase rubs my back roughly, a bear pushing at a tree. “Why?”

“She’s done a lot of things that were kind of wild. She put my parents through hell. She put me through hell, too.” The past swells in my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. “She claims to build things while she actually destroys them. She’s hurt me, Chase. I don’t want her to do that again—not to you, not to me.”

He gives up on his version of a massage. “I don’t really know what that means, Alex. What exactly did she do?”

“She’s that kid who borrows a toy and gives it back broken.”

“Yeah, but you’re both grown up now. My brother used to take my ski gloves and rip them up on a tree run. But that was when we were ten.”

I squeeze my eyes closed for a second, my throat tightening again, as I picture Chase’s perfect family, his banker father and yoga-loving mother and Brad, his brother, who sails yachts. They live in Nantucket now, all of them, but Chase stayed on the west coast for his career. He grew up without a care in the world. It’s one of the things I love about him—his limitless innocence. My own childhood was quite different.