“He said you and Skeet had a fight. Is that a thing? Did you... What’s going on?”
Chloe closed her eyes. She could tell Selah about what had happened on the wharf—the warehouse, the fight, the way Skeet had looked at her as if she was a liability he couldn’t afford. But that would mean explaining the whole story, and Selah would worry, and there was nothing her sister could do from Minnesota anyway.
“I think I messed up.” She moved away from a vendor whose wok sent up clouds of steam that carried the scent of garlic and chili oil.
“With Skeet? Or the story?”
“With everything.” She tucked herself away from the main flow of foot traffic, finding a relatively quiet spot near a stall selling handwoven scarves. “The story’s bigger than I thought. Dangerous in ways I didn’t understand. And I...”
Aw. . . She just . . . well, she didn’t know how to say it.
She’d betrayed him. Left without even a note.
“And you fell in love with Skeet Blackwood,” Selah said gently.
Chloe sighed. “How did you?—”
“Because I know you. The man is a keeper—and not just because he’s hot and sweet and funny—your words, not mine—but because he’s loyal. And you need loyal.”
“He told me that I make reckless choices that hurt people who care about me.”
“I wouldn’t call them reckless. And give the people who care about you a little credit for thinking for themselves.” Selah paused. “But yeah, Skeet has a rather large protective gene. My guess is that he might think he has no choice but to keep you safe.”
“He hasn’t been keeping me safe.”
“Really?”
Chloe sighed. “Okay, yes, I do feel safer with him around. But we’ve been... working together.”
Together.For a while there, yes, they’d been very together.
“It doesn’t matter anyway because I screwed it up.”
“How?”
“By, you know, being me.” She laughed, but it came out bitter. “By thinking I could handle things I shouldn’t have tried to handle. By putting him in danger because I was too stubborn to admit I was in over my head.” She sighed. “By breaking a promise.”
Selah was quiet for a moment.
A couple walked past Chloe hand in hand. She looked away.
Finally Selah said, “Remember when you were twelve and you decided you were going to cure Mom’s depression by cooking all her favorite meals?”
“Yeah.”
“You spent two weeks making elaborate dinners from her old cookbooks—beef stroganoff, chicken cordon bleu, that impossible chocolate soufflé that kept falling. You burned yourself twice and nearly set the kitchen on fire trying to make everything perfect.” Selah’s voice softened with memory. “When I found you crying over a ruined baked Alaska, you weren’t upset because you’d failed. You were upset because you thought you were making Mom’s depression worse.”
“Your point?”
“My point is that you didn’t fail because you couldn’t cook. You failed because what Mom needed wasn’t perfect dinners—she needed professional help and time to heal.” Selah’s voice gentled. “You weren’t incompetent. You just needed to let go and love her enough to let someone with the right tools handle it.”
Chloe wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Hoped no one in the market was paying attention to the foreign woman having an emotional breakdown near the scarf stall.
“I love him.” Her words emerged, barely audible.
“I know.”
“No, Seels, I think Ireallylove him.”