Page 62 of Chasing Your Ghost

“I have an idea.” Riley shifted closer to grab a small handful of popcorn. “Next time I help your dad with one of his projects, you should help too. Maybe he’ll have a set of drawers you could paint a pattern or something onto.”

Instead of the excitement that Riley had hoped to illicit in her half-sister, her words only seemed to cause Olivia to shrink into herself.

“Did I say something wrong?” Riley asked, feeling like she’d somehow made everything worse but not knowing how.

Olivia looked down at the bowl in her lap. “My dad let you help him with his work?”

Riley gulped, not sure what to say. She settled for the truth. “He did.”

Olivia nodded and moved the popcorn bowl off of her lap before standing up. “I’ll be upstairs.”

“Wait,” Riley called out, scrambling off the couch to follow her. “Olivia, what’s wrong?”

The girl stopped at the foot of the stairs and spun around to pin Riley with a tearful glare. “My dad never lets me help him,” she spat.

Riley wanted to kick herself. There was no way she could have known about this, but she still felt terrible for hurting Olivia. “I’m sure if you ask, he’d say yes,” she tried to reason.

Olivia huffed. “He made it very clear after I knocked over a can of paint the first time I was in there that he didn’t want my help.”

“Have you asked him since then?” Riley pressed.

Olivia glowered. “There’s no need to now that he has you to help him,” she seethed. “First, you all go to D.C. without me, and now this. I wish you’d just go back to New York,” she gritted out before spinning around and running up the stairs.

Riley hung her head and covered her face with her hands. “So stupid,” she muttered into her palms, feeling like the world’s biggest screw-up.

She and Olivia were finally getting to a good place, and she’d managed to mess it up spectacularly. It was the cherry on top of her fantastically abysmal day.

“Well, Dad,” she whispered. “Right about now would be a great time for you to reappear and tell me how to fix things.” Riley dropped her hands and looked around, sighing when she expectedly found herself alone. “No? Then I guess I’ll have to figure it out myself.”

Riley paused the movie and began pacing in front of the screen. How was she supposed to make things right with everyone? Should she even bother when she would be moving out and never looking back as soon as classes started at Georgetown? But was that even what she wanted anymore?

Could she leave without getting to know her half-sister properly? Could she leave now that she’d started forming a relationship with Hugh and Noah? But would staying be a betrayal to her dad and everything he’d done to raise her?

Riley just didn’t know, and she doubted she’d figure it out in the next few minutes while pacing the living room. She wasn’t going to find her answers this way, and all she would accomplish was getting herself more worked up and upset.

What she needed was a distraction, and when she looked at the time and saw how late it was getting, she knew exactly what she needed to do. Cooking dinner wouldn’t only take her mind off of Asher and the bad day she’d had. It was a way for her to make it up to Hugh for not helping him lately.

Her plan in place, Riley marched into the kitchen and asked Alexa to play Simple Plan’s new Harder Than It Looks album before pulling open the fridge door. She wasn’t sure what Hugh had been planning to make, but the chicken and broccolini she spotted gave her an idea.

But first, she had to check she had everything else she needed. There were a few lemons in the fruit bowl on the kitchen island, so she mentally checked those off the list. Next, she did a scan of the pantry and found rice and chicken stock. Lastly, she looked through every cabinet in the kitchen until she found the bottles of wine. There were only three, and only one of them was white.

Gnawing on her lip and bouncing a bit to the loud music, Riley pulled the bottle of white wine from the cabinet and looked at the label. The last thing she needed to do was make her dad’s “famous” lemon and wine sauce with an outrageously expensive bottle of wine, so she googled it to ensure it wasn’t anything fancy.

Having confirmed it was reasonably priced, she smiled and tucked her phone back into her pocket. Singing along to the music and with the bottle of wine in her hand, she spun around and found Hugh and Edith staring at her from the other side of the kitchen island.

“Oh my god,” Riley gasped, her hand flying up to her chest. “You scared me. I didn’t hear you come in.” Her music had ensured that. “Alexa, pause the music.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Edith asked, her voice shattering the new silence like a whip. Riley had never heard the woman speak so sternly, especially not toward her.

“What?”

Her egg donor stormed around the island and yanked the wine bottle from her hand. “We leave the house for an hour, and this is what you get up to?”

Riley’s eyes widened with sudden understanding. “No, it’s not what it looks like. I—”

“You were meant to look after Olivia, not get drunk on our wine.”

“That’s not what I was doing,” Riley argued, her gaze moving to Hugh, but there was no help to be found in his disappointed and, for the first time, chilly, blue eyes.

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