Page 31 of Fall Love

“Well, too bad. Because I’m her dad.” I nod toward her belly. “So you’re just going to have to get used to seeing me.”

“I might like him,” Lumi says toward her sister.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she argues back.

I stand my ground for another second until both women are looking at me again.

“You’re still here,” Neve says.

“I’m leaving. But not because you asked so nicely. I’m going because it appears you need another minute with this place and maybe a chat with your sister.”

“About the sale?” Neve spits.

“About me.”

I’m not so obtuse as to think that they won’t be talking about me the second I walk away, and my ears ring all the way to my car, until I glance back at them to see Neve watching me.

A tight expression on her face. One almost as painful to witness as hearing her sob.

Her words filter back through my head.

I hate saying goodbyes. They always hurt so much.

Well, like I told her . . . she better get comfortable saying hello.

To me.

CHAPTER 12

[Neve]

“What is that smell?” Lumi asks, entering through the unlocked front door of my small home.

My house is one story with three main rooms: a kitchen-living room combination, a bathroom, and one bedroom. The rectangular shape aligned perfectly with two windows that overlook a flagstone path to the front door centered between them. A bell steeple on the top of the house makes it look like an old-fashioned schoolhouse. However, I bought this place for the view out the back. The one looking toward the bay in the distance. The place was a steal when I purchased it roughly twelve years ago. It is snug and tiny and all mine.

“I’m making a pie,” I call out. Or at least, I was trying to make one.

“What the . . . since when are you a baker?”

My sister loves to bake. Cookies. Cupcakes. Bread. She’s good at that kind of stuff, and I always thought it was because she had more mom-genes than me. She practically raised me in my teenage years and raised the twins since middle school. Then Danny came along, and she turned those skills to raising her son as a single mom.

But I’m going to be a mom soon, and shouldn’t that baking gene be kicking in?

Instead, I have a mess in front of me on the slim butcher-block table I use as an island to differentiate living space from kitchen.

Flour is on the floor. Something sticky is on the thick wood tabletop. A pile of apples, peeled and sliced, overflows a bowl. And a burned pie crust resembles the outer rim of a tire. Black trim, worn treads, and a slightly rubbery stench.

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” I grumble, tossing an oven mitt next to the ruined pie crust.

Lumi stands on the other side of the table. “Are you ready to talk about it?”

“I think I made the crust too thin and⁠—”

“Not the pie,” Lumi says, trying to keep her patience with me. “What happened yesterday?”

There were almost too many things to unpack from yesterday. My emotional breakdown. That hug with Tate. The way I yelled at him. The fight I’d had with Lumi after he left.

She said she’d give me twenty-four hours to pull myself back together, knowing that her hovering wasn’t going to help.