“Jesus, Chloe,” I mutter, releasing her. “Would you be careful?”
“Would you be honest?” she spits, crossing her arms again.
I spread my arms into the air. “I had fun. Is that what you want to hear? Will you get in the car now?”
Her gaze lingers on me, her body loosening a fraction. “How did it make you feel?”
I shake my head at what is beginning to feel like an impromptu therapy session on the side of the highway.How did it make me feel?
Like an asshole, that’s how it made me feel.
Each stroke of my brush against that canvas, each glance at Chloe as she painted or tended to the kids, it was another nail in the coffin I had unwittingly built for myself. A tight, itchy, dark space of doubt that was closing in around me as everything I thought I knew about her started melting away, and everything I thought I knew about myself came into painfully sharp focus.
Her demand that I be honest echoes in my brain as I run a hand through my hair.
“Confused,” I tell her.
“Why?” she volleys back without missing a single beat.
I blow out a frustrated breath, becauseI knowshe knows why I feel confused. She can’t just let it be. She wants to hear mesayit.
She waits with a frustrating amount of hope and patience in her eyes as another vehicle appears in the distance behind her. Her proximity to the lane boundary causes a storm of anxiety to erupt in my chest.
“I thought I had you figured out,” I say in defeat, and panic, hoping that the quicker I get this out, the quicker I can get her off the side of the road. I lift a hand in the direction of Hope House at her back. “And that was…”Not it.
Her lips part, that damn hope glittering in her eyes. “Different,” I finally say. “The way you were with them, itwas…”
The car behind her slows and turns off the highway, allowing the tension in my chest to release.
Her gaze bounces between my eyes as she waits for the word to fall from my lips. Her focus drops to my mouth like she can already see it forming. The word. The crack in my armor.
At one point during lunch, one of the mothers ran from the room they were all huddled in, her hair disheveled and her eyes wet with tears. Chloe was at her side in an instant; arm wrapped around her shoulders and guiding her to a quieter space away from the chatter of children and laughter that felt out of place.
I think that was the moment the hammer inside my body slammed the final nail into place, confirming for me that I am indeed an asshole. Chloe Stark might be a good person, and all I’ve done is drag her name through the mud. Throw fistfuls of dirt against her already tainted image, instead of attempting to see what lies beneath the surface of her mother’s notorious maiden name.
“It was just different, okay?” I swallow the lump lodged in my throat, the cavity around it painfully dry and scratchy.
She stares at me for a beat, the unsaid words hanging in the cool air between us.
“Okay,” she says quietly, turning from me and heading back in the direction of the parking lot and my truck.
“Okay?” I stand dazed on the shoulder of the highway before I jog after her, catching up to her at my truck and pulling the door open again.
She climbs inside quietly, settling herself in the passenger seat as I close her in and circle my truck, irrationally upset about the canvases that separate us.
***
“Where’ve you been?” Alex raises his eyes to mine as I cross the office in his direction.
“Hope House,” I grumble, sitting at my desk and pulling my laptop open for a distraction.
“Doing interviews?”
“Something like that.”
I pull up the missing persons’—now dead persons’—case files, hoping for something new that will link Chloe to the men and remind me why I can’t trust her. Why I hate her.
There’s nothing, and all it does is make me feel like a piece of shit.
