“What?” Thea exclaimed. “What’s he talking about? Can someone please tell me what the hell happened last night?”

Her sister’s outburst had a silencing effect on the entire house. Even Butter dropped to the floor with a whimper. Liv sucked in a breath, glared one last time at Mack, and lowered her voice.

“Can I just talk to you alone, please?” she asked Thea.

“We’ll be outside,” Gavin said. The sound of their feet hurrying toward the back door had a cartoonish effect.

Liv followed Thea into the kitchen and sat down at one of the tall chairs lining the granite island. She watched silently as her sister stormed to the fridge and withdrew the ingredients for what looked like maybe an omelet.

“What’re you doing?” Liv asked, following her sister’s trek to the stove as eggs, milk, and cheese threatened to spill out of her arms.

“Making you something to eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well I need something to do to keep from screaming.”

“Could you make me pancakes instead, then?”

Thea slammed down the ingredients and glared over her shoulder. So that was a no for pancakes.

Thea dragged a skillet out of a cupboard, plunked it onto the stove, and whipped on the burner beneath it. She aggressively cracked an egg against the edge of the counter and dumped the goo into the skillet.

“I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me this last night,” she snapped, taking it out on another egg.

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“It’s my job to worry about you.”

Here we go . . .

Liv held back a bone-weary sigh. At twenty-six, Thea was only a year older than Liv, but it might has well have been twenty. Their parents divorced in a messy split when Liv was nine, and eventually they were forced to live with their grandmother for a while. Thea had taken on the role of big sister and mom, and even now as adults, she had a hard time relinquishing the role. Not that Liv was going to complain. If not for Thea’s support, she’d probably still be a loser with no goals, no future, and no culinary degree. So no, she wasn’t going to complain about Thea’s overprotectiveness right now.

Thea attacked the eggs with a vicious stir. “So I hope this means you’re going to finally let me give you some money?”

Liv made a yeah right noise. “Nope.”

“You are so stubborn.”

“She said as she unnecessarily beat the shit out of some eggs,” Liv deadpanned. “You know the key to scrambled eggs is low heat and a gentle folding motion, right?”

Thea glared over her shoulder. “Do not lecture me about cooking right now.”

“Then don’t lecture me about money.”

“You don’t have any money.”

“Not true. I have enough saved up to last for a couple of months.”

Thea turned off the stove and unceremoniously dumped the eggs onto a waiting plate. Then she turned and plunked the plate in front of Liv. A glass of orange juice followed.

“Do I get a fork?”

Thea practically threw one at her.

Liv ducked. “What’re you mad at me for?”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m worried. And I get angry and tense when I’m worried.”

Liv poised her fork over the eggs. “Yeah, I know.”

Thea sat down next to her. “So what are you going to do?”

“What else? Find another job.” And make sure that fucker pays.

Liv’s friend, Alexis, owned her own café. “Maybe Alexis needs some help in the meantime.”

“Thea, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure everything out, okay?”

“I’ve heard that before.”

Her words were like a knife to an old wound. “I’m not the fuckup I used to be, Thea. Give me some credit.”

Thea reeled back. “I have never called you a fuckup.” Thea had just enough sincerity in her voice to make Liv feel guilty.

It was true. Thea had never said those words to Liv. She was just projecting. Liv had called herself a fuckup enough times in her life that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But she thought she was beyond those days. Now here she was—unemployed and carrying a heavy secret that she had no idea how to deal with.

“Please just let me help you,” Thea said, leaning forward again. “Let me pay off your loans, or—”

“No.”

“Gavin and I have more money than we know what to do with, and you’re family.”

“Stop, Thea. I’m not taking money from you.”

Thea tossed her arms in the air with a frustrated sound. “Why? What is wrong with accepting my help?”

“Because that’s all I’ve done my entire life!” Liv blurted. She instantly regretted it. Thea got that look on her face—that half mom, half best friend look that had always been the defining balancing act of their relationship.

“Look, I will find another job,” Liv said quickly before Thea could launch into one of her sisterly lectures. “I don’t know when or where.” Or if Royce will try to ruin me. “But I will find something.”

Thea bit her lip. “What about working for Mack?”

Liv snorted. “Uh, no.”

“Why not?”

Liv shoveled in another bite and chased it down with orange juice. “I worked in a bar for three years during school. I don’t want to do it again.”

“But this would just be temporary until you can find another pastry chef job.”

“No.”

Thea opened her mouth as if to argue further but then apparently thought better of it. Instead, she turned her ire onto Royce. “I can’t believe that jerk. After everything you’ve put up with, the hours you’ve worked, the holidays you’ve missed, the abuse you’ve had to endure. Just like that, you’re done because of one mistake?”

Not exactly. Liv didn’t say it or correct Thea’s misunderstanding. Liv didn’t know what she was going to do, but she did know one thing: she was not going to tell her sister the whole story about how and why she got fired. Telling her the truth meant getting her involved, and Liv was not going to drag her sister into this mess. Liv had already been the cause of too much trouble for Thea throughout their lives. The past two years had been the only ones when she hadn’t been a major burden on her sister. There was no way she was going to turn back the clock now.

The slide of the French doors in the living room brought their conversation to a quick, blessed end. Ava and Amelia ran into the kitchen, pigtails swinging in unison.

“Aunt Livvie!” Ava yelled, throwing herself against Liv’s legs.

Liv crouched down and gathered them into a tight hug. They smelled like the outdoors and strawberry shampoo.

“Can you play with us?” Amelia asked.

“You know what? I actually have to get going—”

“What?” Thea said. “Where are you going?”

“—but I promise I will be back soon to play, okay?”

The girls nodded and pulled away. Liv stood just as Gavin and Mack shuffled nervously into the kitchen. Their eyes darted between Liv and Thea as if asking permission to enter.

She needed to get out of there before the interrogation started again.

“My offer stands, Liv,” Mack said, sober in a way she wouldn’t have expected from him.

“I appreciate it. Really. But I’ll find something,” she said. She looked at Thea then. “And I can’t take your money. This is something I need to figure out on my own.”

“No, you don’t,” Thea said.

“Then can you just accept that I want to?”

Thea’s face softened with understanding—an expression Liv had only ever seen on one other person in her life. If not for Thea and Gran Gran, Liv would have been lost.

Liv closed the distance to Thea and wrapped her in a tight hug. “Trust me,” she whispered. “I’ll be okay.”

Thea gave her a squeeze and lowered her voice. “I do trust you.”

Liv escaped before Thea could see how much those words meant to her. And how desperately she wanted to live up to them.

CHAPTER FIVE

The next morning, Liv’s landlord, Rosie, tucked a hen named Gladys under one arm and planted her free hand on her other hip. “I was burning my bra forty years ago over shit like this, and it’s still happening.”

Liv reached into the nesting box and felt around until her fingers found two more eggs. She put them in the basket and shut the lid.

“You did the right thing,” Rosie said. “You couldn’t let him do that to that poor girl.”

“Too bad that poor girl won’t stand up for herself.” Liv yanked open the door to the root cellar where Rosie stored eggs, vegetables, and chicken supplies. “How could she not want to report this? Doesn’t she know he’s going to just keep doing it?”

“Most women don’t report it.”

“Which I don’t understand.”

“I suppose until you’ve been in their shoes, you can’t.”

Rosie set down Gladys to join the twenty other hens scratching around in the freshly overturned flower beds. She kicked her foot out to knock back Randy the Rooster, who was on a mission to impregnate as many hens as possible in his lifetime. Liv didn’t know why Rosie didn’t either get rid of him or put him in a soup pot. Probably because his one redeeming quality was that he hated men as much as Rosie and chased off everything with a penis that tried to enter the farm.

That’s probably why Liv stayed there too. She’d answered Rosie’s ad two years ago for someone to live in her garage apartment and help out around her organic farm, which hadn’t actually been Liv’s thing, but she couldn’t afford to live downtown, and she didn’t want to intrude on her sister’s family life.

The day she’d moved in, Liv had found a beaten-up copy of the original Our Bodies, Ourselves sitting on the bedside table like a hotel might set out the Bible. She’d fallen in love with the place and Rosie immediately.