Chapter 6 #2
Her chest tightened painfully, the gravity of the situation hitting her full force.
She couldn’t go to prison. She couldn’t spend the next twenty-five years of her life locked up for a crime she didn’t commit.
Day in, day out, waking up and eating all her meals in a mess hall, taking five-minute tepid showers, and making license plates and other goods that would inevitably wind up in the supply chain for some big-
box store.
“I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I swear I really was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Sam needed them to understand. “And all that stuff you found at my apartment? At Glut? That’s not mine.”
“Sure, sweetheart.”
Sam clenched her jaw and reminded herself that snapping at the police officer who at least partially held her fate in his hands wouldn’t do her any favors. “I—I’ll take a lie detector test.”
Jenkins shook his head. “Polygraphs haven’t been admissible in court in New York since 1938.”
“Nice try, though,” Roscoe added.
A shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits knock sounded at the interrogation room door and Sam’s heart slingshotted into her throat.
“I got it.” Heaving a sigh, Roscoe got to his feet and stretched, his back snap-crackle-popping. He walked to the door and stuck his head out into the hall. “Yeah?”
After a moment spent conferring with whoever stood on the other side of the door, Roscoe looked over his shoulder, gaze skipping right over Sam, and to Jenkins said, “C’mere a sec.”
Detective Jenkins shoved himself back from the table, his chair legs screeching.
He joined Roscoe at the door. Sam had never been this on edge before, this anxious, legs restless and chest tight, feeling like she was about to crawl out of her skin.
Who were they talking to? Was it about her?
What happened next? Was she supposed to request a lawyer? What about her one phone call?
“You’ve got a visitor.” Jenkins stepped to the side and Sam collapsed against the table, tears springing to her eyes.
“Hannah!”
She was a sight for sore eyes. Her leopard-print dress clung to her curves, formfitting and asymmetrical, and she’d piled her long, chestnut-colored hair atop her head in a messy, Pamela Anderson–style updo that highlighted the elegant column of her neck and the sweet curves of her cheeks, and Sam wanted to bury her face against Hannah’s throat and hide from the world and just breathe her in, violet and sandalwood and cocoa butter.
Hannah slipped inside the room and gave Detective Jen kins a nod. He shut the door, granting them the pretense of privacy.
“I’m so glad you’re here. Well, not here , but—” Sam managed a watery smile. “God, is it good to see you.”
Even if it was from across the interrogation room of a police precinct that smelled like skunky weed and Lysol spray and burnt coffee.
Hannah’s features pinched. “Sam.” Her strappy gold heels clicked against the terrazzo floor. “It’s good to see me?” She slipped into the chair across from Sam, perching on the edge of the seat. “You’re handcuffed to a table and that’s what you have to say?”
Her mouth opened and closed as she floundered for the right words, the ones that would erase the scowl from Hannah’s pretty heart-shaped face. “I know this looks bad, but—”
“It’s true what everyone’s saying, isn’t it? Coco, the police, Channel Five news.” Hannah spun one of the photos on the table around for a closer look. Her expression soured, her lips pursing. “You’re the ringleader of the Manger Mafia.”
“It’s a misunderstanding—”
“You’re a terrible liar, Sam.” Hannah tipped her head back and blinked away the sheen of tears gathering in her gray eyes. “God, what were you thinking?”
Hannah wanted to know what she was thinking?
Well, this Sam? The one in the photos, the one who’d broken into warehouses and God knew where else, the one who—with the help of her coworkers-cum-employees—had stolen over thirteen million dollars in food items and sold them on the black market?
Sam had no memory of any of it, no idea what had led this Sam to turn to a life of crime.
But she had been willing to gamble her own soul to get Hannah back, so maybe they weren’t so different. Maybe desperation born out of love for the woman sitting across from her had driven both Sams to make choices that, from the outside looking in, seemed beyond the pale.
Sam took in the faint spray of brown freckles across the bridge of Hannah’s snub nose and the beauty mark beside her mouth that if Sam had kissed once she had kissed a hundred times.
She stared into Hannah’s eyes, immeasurably deep pools of gray she wanted to spend the rest of her life getting lost in, and she meant to deflect, to stress again just how big a misunderstanding this all was, but heartsick as she felt, what came out was, “I did it for you.” She darted a panicked look at the mirror on the wall that, if all those cop procedurals on television held any truth, was actually a window.
“I mean, if I did it. It would have been for you.”
“This is my fault?” Hannah reared back, looking gobsmacked. “Are you saying I drove you to a life of—of crime or—”
“No! Of course not.” She just desperately needed Hannah to understand that this wasn’t about some avaricious desire to be wealthier than sin; it was about love. About loving her. “I’m only saying—”
“I never asked you to rob anyone. I never asked you to steal for me. I—God, you stole from Coco, Sam. Coco. ”
She frowned, not really sure why that part mattered. “I know you’d never ask me to do anything like that. I know. I just … I love you so much, Han. I love you so much that I swear it makes me stupid.”
Sam loved her so much, sometimes she didn’t know what to do with it all, her heart fit to burst, her bones aching with keeping it all inside.
The love she felt for Hannah was so big, bigger than she was, heavy in the way things of great import often were, but carrying it wasn’t a burden.
It was a privilege, one Sam would never take for granted.
“ Stupid ’s certainly the word for it,” Hannah muttered, and Sam lowered her eyes, her shoulders slumping.
“I know. I know, but—” The cushion-cut diamond on Hannah’s finger caught the light, and for a moment she forgot how to breathe because that …
that was an engagement ring. The kind of ring Hannah deserved.
Not the puny, pathetic placeholder diamond Sam had proposed with at the restaurant.
“You deserve the world, baby. And I want to be able to give it to you. I would do anything to give it to you, to make you happy.”
In this or any other universe, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for Hannah. To make her smile, make her laugh. To shoulder her burdens, make her load a little lighter, her life brighter.
“Do I look happy to you?” Hannah sniffled, and Sam’s heart fractured as a single, solitary tear trickled down Hannah’s cheek.
Sam yearned to take Hannah in her arms and tell her everything would be all right, but the metal cuffs were too tight, digging into her wrists each time she stretched her arms too far away from where the connecting chain was secured, bolted to the table.
“Please don’t cry,” Sam whispered, throat thick. “You know I hate it when you cry.”
Hannah scoffed and wiped the tear away furiously. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you got arrested for committing multiple felonies.”
“I know, I know. But I’m going to fix this, okay? I’ll—I’ll get a lawyer. The best damn one money can buy.” If all else failed, Sam still had five wishes. “We’ll figure this out. Together.”
Hannah shook her head morosely and admired the ring on her finger with wistful eyes. “This is so unfair. We just got engaged. We had so many plans, and now …”
Dread coiled inside Sam’s belly. “Not had , have . We can still have those plans and do everything you want. Everything you’ve dreamed of.
” She leaned across the table as far as the cuffs would allow.
If Hannah reached out, she could meet Sam in the middle.
“Nothing has to change. I’m going to get a lawyer and—and everything’s going to be okay, all right? You—you don’t have to worry.”
Hannah sat back and tucked her hands beneath the table. “A lawyer won’t be able to get you out of this, Sam. The evidence is stacked against you. You’d be better off just taking the plea bargain while it’s still on the table.”
Sam shook her head, eyes slipping shut. “I can’t do that.”
Not when she was so close to having everything she’d ever wanted. A happily ever after with Hannah. She wasn’t going to risk losing her now.
A soft clatter startled Sam into opening her eyes.
Hannah’s engagement ring blinked back at her from atop the metal table, no longer resting prettily on Hannah’s hand.
“They questioned me, you know.” Hannah stared at her with tears in her eyes. “The police. They wanted to know if I knew anything, and then they told me that—that …” Her chin trembled. “You’re looking at five, maybe ten years, and that’s only if you take the plea bargain.”
Sam’s heart raced and the ache in her throat spread into her chest. “I’m going to fix this—”
“I love you, but I can’t be married to someone who’s going to spend the next decade in prison. With everything with my dad …”
Sam’s heart shriveled to the size of a cherry pit inside her chest.
With all the stress and mess of the night, she hadn’t thought about how it would make Hannah feel, seeing Sam in handcuffs when her own father had spent the better part of her life in and out of prison for everything from tax evasion to insurance fraud.
“Han, this isn’t like that. I’m not like that. You know me. You know I wouldn’t—”
“I know I watched my mom make excuses for my dad my whole life. I know it ate at her. I watched it happen. And I know I won’t make the same mistakes she did.
” Hannah rose to her feet and the door to the interrogation room opened, confirming Sam’s suspicions that the detectives had been watching through a two-way mirror.
“Take the plea, Sam. And take care, okay?”
“Hannah, wait!” The cuffs bit painfully into her wrists when she tried to stand. “Let’s talk about this!”
Strapped to the table, Sam was helpless to do anything but watch as the love of her life walked out the door. Detective Jenkins slipped back into the room and leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets.
“You ready to take that deal, Ms. Cooper?”
Deal.
Sam met the detective’s eye.
“Shenanigans.”