4. Sam
Sam
Everyone’s heads turned when Sam and Talia walked into Sugiyama, the Japanese restaurant where the Omni–Ideal Life celebration was being held. They were all looking at Talia, and Sam smiled privately to himself.
Talia wasn’t infallible, though; she was human with plenty of foibles, and Sam knew most of them. Still, the measure of a person wasn’t in their perfection. It was in the balance of their strengths and their flaws, and in how they managed to keep some sort of equilibrium between the two.
A waiter glided up to them. “Champagne?”
They each took a glass. Sam immediately took a long gulp.
“You doing all right?” Talia asked. “I know this is a lot of people.”
“I like people. It just takes a minute of adjustment.”
“We can hover here together as long as you need.”
He loved that she knew this about him, that she had intuitively always known it.
Sam drank a little more of his champagne but left about half in the flute. “Here,” he said, reaching for Talia’s glass. “Let’s swap.”
“Aw, an almost-empty flute,” she fake-cooed. “This is the best celebration gift you could have gotten me.”
“Oh, hush,” he said. “It’s just the right amount so that no one will try to refill it, but not so full that you’ll get teased for not drinking.”
Talia’s smile sent a glow straight through his core. “Sam Chang, you are my favorite person.”
She had been his favorite person ever since the moment he met her. Seventeen years and counting.
“Ah, the woman of the hour!” An Asian American man in a well-cut plaid blazer and pressed chinos approached them.
Sam examined him. He didn’t mean to, but being an immigrant from Taiwan and growing up in a very white community in Mississippi meant that Sam was still a little surprised—in a pleasant way—every time he came across another Asian person, even though they were plentiful in California.
(He had actually loved Mississippi and still did; it’s just that, growing up, the only other Asian face he knew belonged to the uncle he lived with.)
This man crossing the restaurant, though, was as far from Sam’s absent-minded-professor uncle as possible.
Long, relaxed strides that showed an assuredness that the man belonged here among the Silicon Valley business set? Check.
A glimmer in his eyes that looked like someone about to win a huge hand of poker? Also check.
Sam’s money was on this guy being one of Talia’s early venture capital investors, who would reap a fortune when the Omni acquisition of Ideal Life was complete.
“Sorry,” Talia whispered to Sam. “Incoming, and I can’t stop him.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s do this party thing,” she said.
Sam recognized Talia’s small inhale of breath, the way she steeled herself and put on her professional persona. In fact, it was observing her do this over the years that had taught him how to speed up his own shift from when he had to get out of his head and into the company of others.
“Ryan, hello!” Talia said. “I’m so happy to see you here.” She shook his hand. “May I introduce you to my friend Sam Chang?”
“Sam, a pleasure. I know you just got here, but do you mind if I steal Talia from you? We’re doing photographs for the press over in the corner with all the investors and the Omni team.”
Bingo, Sam thought, about his guess that Ryan was an investor. Although Sam wasn’t surprised; he was good at reading cues from physical details like clothes and body language. It was all part of understanding the other players in a game of poker or, sometimes, in life.
Like at his bookstore—he could tell who was likely to buy something and who wasn’t.
There were the casual browsers who were killing time before a tide-pooling tour, with no intent to leave the shop with a book (it would get in the way of tide pooling).
There were people thinking of adding a novel to their nightstand if something happened to pique their interest. And then there were the readers who were truly on the hunt, who had a voracious need that was a mixture of doubt and hope that they would find a book that would change their life.
That was what got Sam up in the mornings—the possibility of doing that for someone.
It was also why he understood Talia’s drive and passion for Ideal Life—he and she both wanted to touch people’s lives in however small a way they could to make them better.
Well, maybe Talia’s way isn’t small, he thought. Ryan stood waiting for Sam’s response about stealing Talia for the press junket.
“No worries,” Sam said to them. “I want to go watch the sushi chefs anyway. Have fun.”
And that might be all the time Sam had with Talia tonight.
But that was okay. He knew that what she needed from him wasn’t constant presence by her side but just the knowledge that he was here in the restaurant.
Their friendship was a give-and-take, where sometimes Talia gave, and sometimes Sam did. Tonight was his turn.
Besides, he was happy to take advantage of the fact that Omni was footing the bill for tonight—he would eat his weight in overpriced, fancy sushi.
“Excuse me,” a woman said, coming in from the entrance behind him. “This is the Omni–Ideal Life party, right?”
Sam turned to her. “Yes. Are you a reporter?”
She blinked at him, caught off guard by his quick assessment. “How could you tell?”
He shrugged. “Just a guess.” It hadn’t been, though; he’d been 99 percent sure.
Her suit was smart but off-the-rack—she was too dressed up to be a startup employee but not tailored enough to be a VC.
Her heels were low pumps with rubber soles, practical for running around town after stories.
Also, the notebook peeking out of her purse. “What outlet are you from?”
“Laura Owusu, the San Francisco Chronicle.”
“Ah, good; you didn’t get caught in traffic.”
She squinted at him. “I’m sorry?”
Oh, right. She didn’t know about what had happened in the last iteration of this party. Sam laughed his comment off as if it had been a joke. “You know, 101 is always a gamble. Could be thirty minutes from San Francisco to Palo Alto, could be three hours.”
Laura laughed. “So true. Listen, do you happen to know where Talia Morgan is? We’re supposed to be doing some press stuff.”
Sam pointed to the far side of the restaurant where Talia and Ryan had gone. “You haven’t missed anything. They’re about to get started.”
At the sushi bar, the intern he’d met earlier sat next to him.
“Could I have an Ideal Roll?” Erin asked the chef, ordering one of the specials for the night. “There’s no nuts in there, right? I’m allergic.”
“No,” the chef said. “The ingredients are black sushi rice—representing ‘dark mode’ interfaces favored by programmers—wrapped with avocado, which is very Californian, Wagyu beef because OmnisZcience is the best, and topped with gold flakes as a nod to Ideal Life’s incredible valuation.”
“Sounds delicious,” Erin said. She unsheathed a pair of wooden chopsticks and turned to Sam while she rubbed the wood splinters off of them. “So, I heard you and Talia met while you were in college. That’s so amazing. Have you been in love with her all this time?”
Sam nearly choked on his sashimi roll. “What?”
Erin smiled. “Don’t worry—I haven’t told anyone.
I don’t think Talia knows, either. But I could tell by how you swapped your champagne for hers so she could carry a partially drunk one, and the way you looked at her when she walked away with that venture capital guy; it was like, I don’t know, a sense of wonder was beaming out of you. It was really sweet.”
“I think you’re reading the signs wrong. Talia and I are just friends.”
“Okay,” Erin said, still smiling like she didn’t believe him at all. “Then tell me how you met. Because I’m a rising junior now, and I’m hoping my soulmate—I mean, my ‘just a friend’—is floating around somewhere on campus, too.”
“You’re very forward, you know that?” Sam laughed.
Erin did, too. “I know. It’s something Talia’s trying to soften in me. She says I have a lot of promise, but right now, I’m like the overly excited kid who runs straight into the flock of pigeons and scares them all away. Her goal is to teach me how to feed the pigeons instead.”
“You’ve got time. Talia started out by scaring the pigeons, too.”
“Do tell.”
The sushi chef slid her Ideal Roll over the glass counter, but Erin ignored it, leaning in toward Sam instead.
“It’s not that exciting of a story,” Sam said. “Basically, I was kind of a recluse in college—not on purpose, but I tend to get lost in books or even my own head, and it’s easy for me to forget to actually go out into the world. Well, Talia wasn’t going to let that stand.
“She found out that the physics department hosted a regular Thursday-night poker game. So one Thursday night, Talia walked into my room, grabbed the novel I was reading out of my hands, and dragged me out of the dorm without telling me where we were going. Now, keep in mind she had her younger sister with her—”
“Wait,” Erin said. “You know Libby?”
“Yeah. Talia’s family lived about thirty minutes away, and since Libby was sixteen then, she’d often drive over and do her homework while hanging out with us in the dorm.
Sometimes I’d go to Talia’s room and she wouldn’t be there, but Libby would—she used to climb in the first-floor window.
We spent so much time together back then I basically adopted her as my own little sister, which was nice because I don’t have any siblings.
So, you’ve met Libby, too? I didn’t think she was around this summer. ”
“No…” Erin blushed. “I’ve just heard about her.”
Sam smiled softly. “Yeah, I guess everyone has. Pretty wild that that kid is all grown-up and world-famous now. Anyway, the poker game. Talia marched us from the dorm all the way across campus to the physics department building. Then she sat me down at the table without even asking me if I knew how to play.”
“Did you?” Erin asked.