Samuel, to his credit, shifted seamlessly into professional mode. “Absolutely. Ladies, who’s first?”
The next few minutes were a masterclass in celebrity photo management. Samuel posed with each woman, signed napkins and receipts when they produced them, answered questions about upcoming plot lines with practiced vagueness, and charmed them so thoroughly that by the end they were inviting him to their church’s Christmas potluck.
“You’re very good at that,” I said as we finally escaped back to the Range Rover.
“Seven years of practice.” He slumped into the passenger seat with obvious relief. “God, I’m exhausted.”
“They seemed nice.”
“They were nice. That’s what makes it hard.” He pulled off his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. “If they were mean or aggressive, it would be easier to just say no. But they’re sweet, and they genuinely love the show, and they just want a photo to show their grandchildren. How do you say no to that?”
“You don’t. You hide in photo booths and develop elaborate escape plans.”
He laughed, and some of the tension left his shoulders. “Can I see them?”
I pulled out the strips, and we studied them in silence.
The first photo: both of us looking startled, too close together, his hand on my arm.
The second: caught mid-laugh, awkward angles.
The third: trying to look normal and failing.
The fourth: something softer. Something that looked almost like intimacy, even though it wasn’t. Even though it couldn’t be.
“These are terrible,” Samuel said finally.
“Agreed.”
“We look like we were being held hostage.”
“Voluntarily held hostage.”
He took one of them from me and carefully tucked it into his wallet. “I’m keeping this one.”
I should have said something. Should have asked why. Should have acknowledged that keeping photo booth strips was something people did when they wanted to remember a moment, when a moment meant something.
Instead, I slipped the rest into my coat pocket and started the engine.
We drove back toward the mountains in comfortable silence, the kind that only happens between people who’ve just shared something they can’t quite name. The winter sun was sinking toward the horizon, painting everything in shades of gold and amber.
Samuel had his head tilted back against the seat, eyes closed, looking more relaxed than I’d seen him since the grocery store incident. His hands were folded in his lap, and I could see the edge of the photo strip peeking out from his wallet.
I shouldn’t be feeling this way.
It had only been a couple of weeks since I’d walked into that supply closet and watched my entire life implode in the space of a heartbeat. That wasn’t enough time. You couldn’t process three years of betrayal in a few days and emerge ready to trust someone new.
You definitely couldn’t develop feelings for your neighbor—your temporary, celebrity neighbor who would be gone in a few weeks—just because he made you laugh and looked at you like you were interesting and let you rescue him from overzealous fans.
That wasn’t how healing worked. That wasn’t how anything worked.
But God, I wanted it to work.
I wanted to believe that someone could see me—really see me, the way Samuel seemed to. And I wanted to believe that buying cat food together at a Whole Foods could mean something.
But wanting and believing were two very different things.
“What are you thinking about?” Samuel asked, eyes still closed.
