Chapter 12
H ANNAH PATTED HER face dry with a hand towel, watching Sam from the doorway of the bathroom. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” Sam punched her pillow and settled onto her side. “Just tired.”
Tired thanks to this real-life choose your own adventure, where every move she made and word that came out of her mouth could make or break her hard-fought happily ever after.
How long until she didn’t have to overthink? How long until she was fully caught up to speed on the changes in her life? How long until she went full method and truly became the woman of Hannah’s dreams instead of just living in her skin?
Hannah leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you that upset.”
“I know, and … look, I’m sorry for kind of flying off the handle. It’s just—”
“ Kind of? ” Hannah huffed a laugh. “Sam, you sat there and told a total stranger that she has attachment issues.”
“Because she does!”
Hannah sighed and pushed off the doorframe, disappearing into the bathroom. “Again, total stranger!”
“Oh, come on! It was obvious. Anybody who heard even half the things she said could tell you that.”
“Maybe,” Hannah said, returning a moment later, rubbing a cotton pad soaked in toner on her skin. “But why do you care? You don’t know her, and chances are, you’re never going to see her again.”
Sam wouldn’t be so sure. “Who said anything about caring? I don’t care.”
“Mm-hmm. Sure.”
“I don’t . Da— Cassandra got under my skin. That’s all.”
Hannah leveled her with a look. “You don’t say.”
Sam sat up, propping herself on her elbow.
“It’s just that she was acting so … so holier than thou.
” The irony was not lost on her. “All that crap she was on about marriage being antiquated and feeding the wedding industrial complex and love at first sight being horseshit.” She scoffed.
“I bet she doesn’t believe in soulmates, either. ”
Because you’d have to have a soul to have one of those.
“Was she kind of a bitch about it?” Hannah tossed the cotton pad in the trash. “Yeah, she was a little intense, but I can’t say I disagree with her.”
“Intense is bit of an—” Wait. Had her ears deceived her or had Hannah just said she agreed with Daphne? “What did you say?”
Hannah padded over and sat on the edge of the bed, leg tucked under her. “I had no idea you believed in that stuff.”
“Stuff,” she repeated flatly. “Exactly what stuff are we talking about here?”
Because she knew Hannah, with her Pinterest boards and bridal magazines stacked around the apartment, wasn’t talking about the wedding industrial complex.
“Love at first sight. Soulmates.” Hannah shrugged helplessly.
“If I’m being honest, you kind of blindsided me at dinner, Sam.
All of a sudden, you’re telling this stranger that our eyes locked and it was this—what words did you use?
Instant and intense thing?” Hannah bit her lip.
“I know we never talked about it, but I guess I assumed we were on the same page about it being …”
“Being what ?” Sam wanted to know. Heaven forbid she make the same mistake as Hannah and assume .
Hannah laughed like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Like Sam was being unreasonable.
“Are you seriously going to bite my head off the way you did Cassandra’s at dinner?
” Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek.
“You know,” she said, staring down at the bed, “for a second there, I think Tom and I both thought you two were going to— God , go at it right in front of us. Right in front of my salad .”
She felt the blood drain from her face. “What the hell? I didn’t—Hannah, you know I would never—”
“No, I know. I know.” Hannah sighed. “It was just intense. I swear if someone had told me you two had met before I think I’d have believed it.”
Sam bit her lip. “Han—”
“No, it’s ridiculous, I know.”
It was all kinds of ridiculous.
Sam loved Hannah. Even if she removed her from the equation—impossible to do considering Hannah was the equation, the entire reason Sam had met Daphne in the first place, or rather the whole reason Daphne had orchestrated their first encounter—the idea that she and Daphne would ever … it was laughable.
Yes, Daphne was … pleasant to look at. Okay, pretty .
She was pretty. Sam could admit that. But she was a demon .
She had a tail, for fuck’s sake. And a forked tongue, a forked tongue whose two halves Sam had firsthand knowledge Daphne could move independently, and Sam was horrified to admit that when Daphne had pressed her up against the inside of the elevator, she’d gotten kind of …
hot in a way that had nothing to do with the anger setting her blood on fire. Aroused.
But that had been biology. Physiology. Sam was attracted to women and a very attractive woman-shaped demon had been touching her suggestively. Nothing more to it than that.
“Baby.” Hannah looked up at Sam from beneath her lashes. “Do you seriously want to argue about something as silly as soulmates right now? It’s not like either of us can prove it.”
Sam frowned.
It wasn’t silly to her.
It never was, and it wasn’t doubly so now that her soul was a chip on some cosmic poker table.
“Hey, don’t make that face.” Hannah crawled across the bed and cradled Sam’s face in her hands.
“Just because I didn’t fall in love with you the moment I set eyes on you doesn’t meant I’m not crazy about you now.
” She smoothed away Sam’s frown, stroking over her brows with her thumbs. “It just took me a minute.”
“When did you?” Sam asked. “Know. That you loved me?”
Hannah pursed her lips, thinking. “Hmm. Chicago.”
Sam had never been to Chicago in her life.
Not that she knew of, at least.
“You know,” Hannah continued. “That night at the James Beard Foundation Awards. When you got up onstage to accept the award for Outstanding Chef and the whole room was standing up and clapping for you and—I was so proud. Proud of everything you’d achieved, and I knew in that moment that you were going places.
Places I wanted to go with you. I saw you standing up there and you looked so beautiful, and I just knew then and there that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. ”
It was like hearing someone else’s love story. Hearing those usually gave her a secondhand sense of butterflies. Made her chest all warm and her stomach fluttery the way watching a good romance movie did. Even hearing a love song.
But the butterflies never came, and her chest just felt … hollow. Tender, too, like something had been carved out, was missing.
“I love you, Sam.” Hannah tucked a strand of hair behind Sam’s ear. “Let’s just put this weird night behind us, okay?” She leaned in and pressed a kiss to the corner of Sam’s mouth and Sam felt a phantom flutter in her stomach. “Get some rest.”
Sam had a feeling she was going to need it.
“I was thinking,” she said the next morning when Hannah’s alarm went off at five thirty a.m. “What if I came with you?”
“With me where?” Hannah tied the laces on her black Nike workout shoes.
“What is it this morning? SoulCycle? Barre?”
Hannah shot her a look of fond exasperation over her shoulder. “I do flywheel, not SoulCycle. And it’s Thursday. Barry’s Bootcamp. You know that.”
“Right. Barry’s Bootcamp.” Whatever that was. “I could come with you.”
“That’s sweet,” Hannah said, standing and shouldering the strap of her bright orange quilted gym bag. “But you’ve got the taping at the restaurant this morning. Remember?”
“The taping. Right.” She nodded like she knew what Hannah was talking about and crossed her fingers that this taping was on her Google Calendar; otherwise, she was screwed.
That calendar was the closest thing Sam had to a series bible of her life right now, and she had a feeling it would be the only thing getting her through these next few days. Weeks, maybe.
Hannah waved on her way out the door. “You don’t have to be up for another hour. Get some sleep.”
Sam smiled and tucked her hands under her head, closing her eyes.
As soon as the front door shut, she threw back the covers and snatched her phone off the nightstand.
Reminder: Thursday, October 30, 9 a.m. GMA interview taping @ Glut
Good Morning America ? As if it wasn’t hard enough avoiding sticking her foot in her mouth in her day-to-day life, now she’d get to do it on national television. Joy.
She looked at the time. It wasn’t even six.
But if she got there early, before anyone else was there, she could do a little poking around.
Check out the back office, her back office now, assuming she ever used it.
She wasn’t expecting to find an actual series bible of her life lying around, but she never knew what she might discover that could help her piece together her life as it was.
She didn’t have amnesia, not in the strictest sense, so it wasn’t like she expected to experience a flood of memories when she looked at a picture, but who knew?
At the very least, she might be able to figure out what it was that Coco had done to her that had left everyone in a tizzy.
Forty-five minutes later found her walking the same path from Houston Street as she had yesterday, only this time, instead of going through the front, Sam made her way around to the back, the alley pitted with puddles from the rain overnight.
This early, no one would be in, not unless they were expecting a delivery, but that happened on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, with an additional produce drop on Thursdays, but not until closer to midday. Sam called out when she stepped inside just in case and was met with silence.
The office was past the kitchen all the way at the end of the hall, the last door on the left, right across from the singlestall employee restroom and two separate storage closets, one for cleaning supplies and the other where the staff stashed their bags and coats and other various belongings.