Page 46 of Head Over Heels

“Thank you, dear.”

Grace puts a hand gently on Emily’s arm. “We should get going.”

“Yes.” She turns to me, her eyes warm. “Thank you so much for bringing Katie. And I hope I’ll see you next time I get together with Katie and Chase?”

I’ll be in Denver,I think, but all I say is, “I hope so, too.”

Chapter 24

Chase

That night, we each read Katie a book. Liv first, then me. And we say good night to Katie together.

I try not to give it too much significance, but I can’t help feeling like it means something.

It’s the first time I let myself think that maybe Liv will change her mind about going to Denver.

When we’re both settled in the living room afterward, Liv says, “I wasn’t expecting Emily to be so old.”

“She’s sixty-eight.”

“I guess because Thea had Katie so young—”

I shake my head. “Thea was twenty-eight when Katie was born.”

Her startled eyes meet mine. “She was older than you.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know why I thought—” Her look surfs off somewhere in the middle distance, then she seems to come back. “Emily said something…” She bites her lip. “She said Thea wasn’t fair to you. And it surprised me. I don’t know why, but I thought it was simpler than that. I thought it was a one-night thing, you got her pregnant, you guys decided to go your separate ways…”

I laugh. Harshly.

“No, huh?”

I shake my head.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Willyou tell me about it?”

I’ve never toldanyonethis story, not from the beginning. Obviously various people know bits and pieces of it—who Katie’s mom was, the fact that we were never married. Brooks maybe knows the most, but even he doesn’t know how it all started.

Somehow, though, I find myself telling Liv.

“Thea worked for my parents in Austin. She was their head of marketing. She was four years older than me. Polished, competent, confident.

“And I was—I already told you how I was. I’d just had that conversation with my father where he told me he wasn’t leaving me the business, and I was in the process of self-destructing, like I was trying to prove him right.”

She makes a sound like she’s trying to contradict me, but I shake my head, and she nods, letting me continue.

“Thea came to dinner, and, like I said, she wassoput together—I don’t know if I was trying to stick it to my parents or if I wanted to see what she’d be like when she wasn’t so in control, but I decided I was going to get her in bed.”

I cast a look in Liv’s direction, expecting to see judgment on her face, but she’s listening patiently. And I realize that that’s one of the things I like most about Liv, that she doesn’t judge. She just takes it all in.

“Thea had just come off a serious relationship—I think he’d been about to propose, even—and she was going through some stuff of her own. And for some reason she dug the whole bad-boy thing. Or maybe it was the lure of sleeping with the bosses’ kid; I don’t know. She was on the rebound and she wanted to do something crazy, and I was offering the chance. So there we were, and that was all it was supposed to be, except for me, it wasn’t.”

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