“I’ll see you later, Chloe, love!” Shivani called out as she left. She wasn’t leaving the house, of course. No, she was just going downstairs to give Chloe and Gigi some privacy, and also to start Gigi’s wheatgrass, chocolate, and Baileys smoothie, the perfect predinner tipple. Apparently.
“So, darling,” Gigi purred, producing an electric blue silk wrap from thin air and slipping gracefully into it. She came over to the beanbags where Chloe had been waiting patiently for the past half hour. Or, to be truthful, where she’d been waiting sullenly and with a slightly frantic air. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
“I just thought I’d pop by.” Chloe attempted to say this airily, but the words hit the professionally distressed wood floor like six lumps of lead.
Gigi arched a brow. “You, a woman who has not driven voluntarily since 2003—”
“Slight exaggeration, Gigi.”
“—were moved to get into your car, tootle out of your beloved, filthy, gray city—”
“I got a taxi for the safety of the public, actually.”
“—and scurry through the house like a sneaky little mouse to avoid your parents and Eve—”
“I did not,” Chloe lied hotly.
“—because you felt the urge to pop by?” Gigi pursed glossy lips. When had they become glossy? Had she just applied makeup by psychic command? “Darling, as the children say, don’t bullshit me.”
“Ah,” Chloe muttered, “my loving grandmother.”
“Your impatient grandmother who wants her smoothie and her Shivani. I know how you get, Chloe, my love. Save us both the trouble and spit it out.”
Perhaps those words were a spell rather than a suggestion, because they worked. Words tumbled from Chloe’s lips before she could overthink them, convince herself to keep them inside, or even arrange them into something deceptively dry and apparently unimportant. “When you love someone, Gigi—someone who doesn’t have to love you back—and they might hurt you, and you might hurt them, and anything could go wrong, and it already has, how do you know that it’s, erm . . .”
“Real?” Gigi suggested. But, disturbingly, Chloe had no questions on that count. It hadn’t even occurred to her to ask.
Her question was far more difficult. “How do you know that it’s safe? How do you know that it’s worth the risk?” Please tell me it never is. Please tell me that I did the right thing. Please tell me I didn’t abandon Red right back and that we’re better off apart.
No. Please don’t.
Gigi regarded her for a long moment with those beautiful, maddening eyes, framed by smile lines that proved what Chloe already knew: despite her habit of telling her grandchildren not to frown, laugh, or otherwise emote for fear of wrinkles, Gigi had never let anything stop her from living life to the fullest.
Finally, the older woman said, “You’ve asked me two very different questions in one go, Chloe, and I hope you don’t think they’re at all the same. Love is certainly never safe, but it’s absolutely worth it.” She produced an unlit cigarette and twirled it between long, elegant fingers. Since Gigi wasn’t wearing a head scarf this afternoon, her chic crop of white coils on display, Chloe had absolutely no idea where the Marlboro had been hidden. Her knickers? Up one nostril? In an alternate dimension she accessed at will? God only knew.
After a moment, Gigi spoke again. “I fell in love at sixteen with a scoundrel of a man who impregnated and abandoned me, which of course led to my parents kicking me out of the house because I’d set a poor example for my sisters. My caring for your—well, for your grandfather, I suppose—didn’t do anything to fix the fact that he was a pathetic, nasty little man who wasn’t worthy of the love I gave him. And his many flaws, unfortunately, didn’t stop me from adoring him. After all, when it comes to love, it’s not a person’s flaws we’re looking at, now is it?” She smiled wryly, but Chloe couldn’t quite bring herself to smile back. “Love isn’t safe, as that story proves. But is it worth it?” Gigi raised her arms in a typically grand gesture, and Chloe knew she wasn’t indicating the mansion they currently sat in, so different from the tiny family home Gigi had been kicked out of, but the people who lived inside it. “I have your father. I have you girls. And, of course, I have my top-ten hit, ‘Hey, Mr. Dick Junior,’ which, if any lawyers or journalists happen to come sniffing around, has what, darling?”
“Absolutely nothing to do with one Richard F. Jameson, whom my poor, dear grandmother has never even heard of,” Chloe recited obediently. “But, Gigi, I . . . Well, you might as well know that I’m talking about Red.”
“Gasp,” Gigi murmured.
Chloe glowered. “I suppose I’ve fallen in love with him,” she said, which was the least embarrassing way she could phrase I love Redford Morgan like a man-eating tiger loves soft and fleshy upper arms. “And I think he might . . .” She cleared her throat and straightened her spine, accepting what she should’ve known from the start. From the moment he’d called her name through the door. “He loves me, too,” Chloe said. Because she felt in her bones that it was true. “But we hurt each other, and now I feel trapped in this endless hesitation because, well—what if we keep doing it? What if we keep making messes? I’ve always felt like I’m the kind of person who . . .” She smiled, even though it wasn’t funny. “I’m the kind of person who hurts. Too much.”
“No,” Gigi corrected calmly. “You are a woman who, in a life filled with pain, came here to ask about love.”
Those words hit Chloe like a perfect, chiming chord, the kind that reverberated through her very soul. They were true in a way that spoke to her. True in a way that made her take another look at herself. “Yes,” she murmured slowly. “I suppose I am.”
Who else was she? Red always called her tough. He called her a badass. She agreed, because, physically, she was. But emotionally? She’d always been so afraid. And yet . . .
She was the woman who’d come here to ask about love.
She was the woman who’d decided to change her entire life with nothing but a list.
She was the woman who survived, every single day.
She was Chloe fucking Brown, and she was starting to wonder if she’d been brave from the beginning. If she’d just needed to love herself enough to realize it.
She supposed, as the knowledge dawned in her like a sunrise, that she must love herself right now. And it felt good.
*
She went home and opened the notebook.
It had been on her coffee table, shiny and golden, comforting and terrifying, for almost a week now. She grabbed her fake Smudge for moral support, then briefly wondered if she should call Annie for real moral support. But no—Annie was horrible at answering her phone, and while she would call back eventually, Chloe needed to do this now.
She needed him. And he, she rather thought, needed her. Time to find out.
She opened the book. His handwriting was careful not-quite-chaos, so very Red that she ran fond fingers over the letters. Then she told herself sternly to stop mooning and read.