Chapter 14
B ETWEEN ONE BLINK and the next, they were back inside the elevator.
Fingers tangled with Sam’s, Daphne guided her toward the chaise and pushed down on her shoulders until Sam was seated.
One minute Daphne was standing beside her and the next she was pressing a glass of amber liquid into Sam’s hand. She must’ve zoned out for a second. Spaced.
“There’s more where that came from.”
She lifted the glass to her lips and took a gulp. The whisky burned like fire, warming her inside and chasing away the chill that had settled in her chest. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Daphne took a seat beside Sam, sweeping her hands over the skirt of her dress to smooth the bubblegum-colored fabric. The crinoline poked out slightly from beneath the hem.
Sam opened her mouth, a question on the tip of her tongue. She swallowed it with another small sip of whisky, not sure she was ready for the answer. Whatever it might be.
“Go on,” Daphne prompted, obviously sensing both her curiosity and her hesitation. “Whatever it is, you can say it.”
“It’s a question.”
“Okay.” Daphne paused. “Ask me anything.”
She took a long sip before speaking. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
What happened to the demon who had gleefully declared, News flash? I’m evil ? Who had delighted in Sam’s growing frustration and told her perfunctorily there’s no such thing as a free lunch, Sam ?
“Who says I’m being nice?” Daphne tossed her long blond hair over her shoulder and smirked at Sam.
“Maybe this is all part of some grand nefarious scheme to get you to lower your defenses, hmm? Maybe I plan to pull a gotcha and yank the rug out from under you as soon as you drop your guard. Have you thought about that?”
“Daphne.” She sighed. She was too tired for this. “You can cut the bullcrap. Also, you can’t tell me I can ask you anything and then go on to answer my question with another question. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Says who?”
Said Sam. “You’re pussyfooting. Quit.”
Daphne’s eyes narrowed peevishly, and for a minute it looked like she was going to dig her heels in, put up a fight.
After a moment, she sighed, and her shoulders slumped.
“I want to show you something,” she said, lips pursing thoughtfully, but also a little like she’d tasted something bad.
“We’ll see how nice you think I am after. ”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “Okay.”
“You’re not going to like it,” she warned, brows flicking up.
“I said okay.”
“Sam—”
“Just show me already.” She huffed.
The suspense was unbearable, worse probably than whatever it was Daphne wanted to show her. Definitely worse than whatever horrors her own mind could cook up.
Daphne held Sam’s gaze for a moment so long and fraught with words not spoken that it took everything inside Sam not to squirm beneath her unblinking gaze.
Finally, Daphne pointed to the right, drawing Sam’s attention to the cartoonishly oversize look-alike of the retro box TV that had rested on the media console, which was now gone.
It stretched from the floor up to the cathedral ceiling, easily half a dozen feet over her head, the bunny ears squashed flat.
A rainbow-colored standby message appeared on the television.
The screen flickered, suddenly filled with at least a hundred squares, each, by the looks of it, a different video frame.
All at once, they started to play, the effect dizzying.
Sam didn’t know where to look. On second thought, Sam didn’t want to look.
She quickly averted her eyes, her stomach lurching. “Actually, if this is about to be like what you showed me last time, I don’t think I—”
“It’s not,” Daphne said. “These aren’t. I promise.”
Reluctantly, Sam opened her eyes.
On the screen played scenes from Sam’s life. Not just her life; Hannah’s, too. Only, Sam didn’t recognize half of these moments. She didn’t recognize herself in some of them, her hair different, longer, lighter, styled differently.
Sam’s eyes snagged on the top corner of the screen. In the booth of the bar she and Hannah had gone to on their first date, Sam sat, talking. Out of nowhere, Hannah stood and flicked her drink in Sam’s face. That hadn’t happened.
“They’re real,” Daphne said, as if reading her mind. Maybe just reading her. “Or they could have been.”
In the video playing out dead center on the screen, she and Hannah sat at opposite ends of a long conference table inside a glass-walled room.
Sam had a ballpoint pen in her hand and tears swimming in her bloodshot eyes.
Eyes that had lines at the corners of them that Sam didn’t have, didn’t have yet.
On the desk in front of her were divorce papers waiting to be signed.
Her chest ached, hollow with a ghostly grief. Grief that wasn’t hers, the loss not, either, but she felt shades of it all the same.
Delicately, Daphne cleared her throat.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Daphne turned her head and smiled sadly at Sam.
“Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken.’ I get it. What you were trying to do. Go back to where you think it went wrong and make a different choice, but, Sam.” She shook her head.
“Life is nothing but a series of choices, paths constantly diverging. That’s what this is.
” She gestured to the screen. “All those different choices you could’ve made, infinite possibilities. ”
Sam’s eyes flitted over the screen like a stained-glass window into a hundred different lives. She searched for the road that led to a happily ever after with Hannah and couldn’t find it.
“There’s more,” Daphne said, as if again sensing the direction of Sam’s thoughts.
She waved her hand, and the screen changed, one hundred different videos, one hundred different lives.
Sam picked one and watched it for a moment, watched the CliffsNotes version of a life that could have been hers play out in front of her.
A life where Sam had taken Hannah’s advice and quit her job at Glut, found work in a different restaurant as head pastry chef.
She still worked long hours, but she found time, made time to go to the places Hannah wanted.
She scraped and saved and bought her a bigger, better ring, and when she proposed Hannah said yes.
She did everything right except the truly nonnegotiable sorts of things she’d done as Hannah’s perfect partner, the things that Sam would never do.
She did everything right. Yet Sam watched as Hannah and Coco met clandestinely every week, watched as a bedroom door closed behind them, sparing her from seeing the truly gory bits play out.
“She’s never going to choose me, is she?
” Sam swept a knuckle under her eye, but there were no tears to dry.
She’d known the answer before she’d asked the question.
Before she watched a hundred different lives play out on the big screen.
“Me, not somebody who looks like me, has my face, I mean.” Sam tapped her fingertips against her chest. “ Me. ”
Daphne turned, their knees knocking. She dropped her hand to the chaise beside Sam’s, close enough to feel the phantom touch of her pinky. “I know you probably don’t believe me—”
“No. I … I think I do.” She shook her head. Thinking implied uncertainty, and Sam was certain. “I do.”
Her fifth wish had been nothing but a last-ditch, grasping effort to resuscitate something that had died a long time ago. Not her relationship with Hannah—although maybe that, too—but something inside her. Her belief that Hannah was the one. That the one for her even existed.
Sam hadn’t wanted to admit it. Admitting it meant she’d gambled her soul for a woman who at the end of every road would never choose her.
A heaviness settled in her chest.
“You know, my parents have been married for thirty-five years,” she said.
“ Happily married for thirty-five years. They fight sometimes, don’t get me wrong.
My momma’s got a temper, and my dad, he doesn’t have much of a filter; he’s got that foot-in-mouth disease I guess I inherited.
” She shook her head, chuckling softly under her breath.
“One time, Momma was so mad at him, I don’t even know what for, but I remember she pointed her finger at him across the kitchen and said, ‘Don’t test me.
I’ll kill you and swear you died,’ and Daddy—” She laughed, the memory of that moment clear as day.
“Daddy just stared at her for a minute and then said, ‘Am I dilling your pickle right now, honey?’”
Daphne’s lips twitched. “Your mother was mad, and your father made a sexual innuendo.”