Page 33 of Sunset Cove
“They shortened ‘Horcasitas’ to Orcas. Isn’t that fun?”
He smiled. “Very.”
Claire cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Did you grow up around here?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly, but my son ended up going to college in Bellingham and I sort of tagged along.”
“I bet he loved that.”
Chip laughed. “I wanted to be close. Ah...” He paused. “It’s a long story, but we were living in New York City at the time. My wife and I were going through a divorce, and I lost my job, and…yeah. Things sort of fell apart.”
Claire raised her eyebrows. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “It’s all right. It was all my doing. I’ve always been the master of my own destruction. Honestly, I was lucky Steve agreed to hire me on.”
“Did you work in a hotel in New York?”
Chip shook his head. “No, not at all. I worked at an investment bank. Before the crash.”
“Ah, I see,” Claire said, slowly taking another drink from her bell-shaped glass. “So you caused the economy to crash?”
She was joking, but since he didn’t know how to tell her the truth, he just laughed.
Claire clasped her hands in front of her. “You were right, by the way.”
“About what?” he asked.
“This cider. It’s delicious. We have to have it at the festival.”
“Ah.” He took a sip of his – he’d barely had any. He was talking too much. “I’ll have to break it to Ken that I’ve won this battle.”
Claire laughed and agreed.
“How about you?” he asked. “What did you do before you were buying hotels?”
She intertwined her fingers and tucked her hands under the table. “I was a paralegal.”
“That’s quite a jump.”
She nodded. “You know, if I tell you how I ended up here, you might not believe me.”
Chip laughed. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
She let out a sigh, took another sip of cider, and began. “Twenty-nine years ago, I was in my second year of law school, so sure that I had life figured out.”
He nodded. “As we all do when we’re twenty-two.”
She cracked a smile. “I came home for spring break to a crisis. My twin sister Becca was in trouble, again, and my parents were going to rescue her.”
Chip leaned in. It was loud in the tasting room and he didn’t want to miss any details.
Claire continued. “They’d paid for her to stay at a rehabilitation center in Colorado.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Was she an athlete?”
“No, it wasn’t that kind of rehabilitation. Drugs, alcohol…. Becca was troubled.” Claire paused. “Anyway, she threatened to leave and never speak to any of us again unless they came to get her. My parents panicked, as they always did, and my brother-in-law, who was a pilot, borrowed a little plane from a friend. He flew down there with my mom, my dad, and my older sister Holly. They picked Becca up,” she said slowly, “and then crashed into a mountain.”
Chip felt like he’d just crashed into a mountain, too. “I’m sorry,what?”
