“Yeah,” she breathed, her throat collapsing under the weight of the shock.
“Hanna—”
She hung up and turned her phone off. It was the last thing she’d hear him say for a year.
For months after that phone call, she'd wished she had caught him texting someone else, or that she'd seen him in someone's Instagram story, dripping over another woman in a swanky Manhattan bar. It would have been so much easier to hate him if he were a bad guy.
But Logan wasn’t a villain, even if she was the victim.
Her eyes fixed on him as he cut a path across the patio, a baby-blue polo capping his nicer work pants. She wondered if Sloane had picked the shirt for him.
Hanna pulled herself out of the lounge chair and put on her bravest face.
“You want company? Logan doesn’t like me, might be fun.” She tossed a glance at Milo, noting to dig into that piece of information later. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”
She smoothed the hem of her sundress and rolled her shoulders back. The threads of her muscles screamed in protest as she pushed herself across the yard and pasted on the same No really! I'm fine! smile she'd been wearing since the funeral.
If nothing else, her mother’s death had given her a PhD in faking it. In the first few months, she had learned how to easily disarm anyone who knew what happened with the perfect blend of somber eyes and a hopeful nod to prevent them from asking the kind of questions that punched her in the gut and knocked the wind out of her.
You can do anything for fifteen minutes, she told herself, her espadrilles clicking onto the patio.
And she almost believed it.
She used every one of the twenty steps between them to get ahold of her breathing, all for two piercing blue eyes and a megawatt smile to send her heart rate through the roof as he turned toward her.
THREE
Hanna had forgotten how pretty he was.
Logan called out her name like it was a sacred prayer, and her skin flushed with a boiling red tint and thin layer of sweat. She crossed the final distance between them.
“Hey,” she mumbled, resenting how feeble it sounded as she leaned in and hugged him. In all her imaginary dress rehearsals, she hadn’t blocked a hug, and the motion threw her off her balance. She leaned into the momentum and did what none of the thirty sets of eyes on them expected—she hugged Sloane too.
She smelled even better than Hanna feared. Expensive.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” Hanna croaked.
“You too,” Sloan managed, an unexpected sweetness in her tone. She rambled off the requisite small talking points as Hanna tried to manage her breathing.
She liked Phoenix, the sunsets are amazing, the heat is a lot, but at least it’s dry!
Logan’s eyes clung to the floor between them.
When Hanna had counted to one hundred in her head, she widened her bullshit smile and chirped, “I need to freshen up my drink!”
She turned, ready to dart back toward the bar, and patted herself on the back for surviving the first rip of the proverbial band-aid.
“I’ll come with you,” Logan said.
She groaned. So close. “No need!”
“We need drinks, anyway,” he said.
We.
“Okay,” she sighed. Logan walked silently beside her, the heat of Matty’s stare lingering on her back as she busied herself with ice and liquors she wasn’t actually interested in.
“How are you?”
