“Yeah. I know.”
“What about Sam?”
Nora ignored the discomfort in her stomach. “What about him? He drove me back home and dropped me off.”
“That’s all?”
“Yep. That’s all.” She edited out that she’d gone back. That she hadn’t stayed away from him after the fire, and everything was now ruined. Why talk about that?
You’re emotionally unavailable . . .
Daisy sighed. “He’s in love with you, Nora.”
Nora bit the inside of her cheek. She didn’t want to hear it. That it was so obvious to everyone else when she’d missed it. “I love Sam. With all my heart. But it’s not like that.” They’d almost kissed. They’d almost changed everything. They’d almost unraveled the carefully knit together relationship that had sustained them all this time.
It was one of the most terrifying moments of her life,improvedby the fact that she’d discovered her husband had been rushed to the hospital because he had fallen down a mountain.
“Why not?”
“I’m dealing with the fallout of my marriage.”
“So am I.” Daisy wrinkled her nose. “Though it is deeply improved by the amazing sex.”
“Zach doesn’t mean anything to you. Sam is everything to me, and if I mess up what we have, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Zach is notnothingto me,” Daisy said. “I don’t know what he is but ... he’s not nothing.”
Nora looked down at her hands. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean he meant nothing to you now. But I mean, you don’t have this preexistingthingwith him.” She never talked about this stuff. She was very good at deflecting from the reality of her life in foster care. In fact, she was good at it on purpose. But everything felt so ... undone.
Like her life and the whole world was falling apart around her, and the idea of preserving the facade that she’d kept in place all this time seemed silly.
When even Sam was gone.
Of all the people left in her life, other than Sam, Daisy was the closest to a lifelong friend, but even back then, she had kept a lot of her deep, dark personal stuff to herself.
“Sam has seen everything,” Nora said. “He’s met my mom. The whole thing with my family is ugly. It’s not something I like revisiting or talking about, so I have this one person in my life who knows. He knows and he understands everything. It’s the closest thing to acceptance I’ve ever had. To security. To ... family, I guess.”
“You don’t like talking about your past. That doesn’t mean other people wouldn’t accept you.”
“I know. I do know that. I know that you would. I know Soraya would. But I would have to talk about it. I would have to talk about the times when my grandmother slapped me across the face for being disrespectful and told me I was too much of a burden. Or all the times my mom lied to me and said she was going to get clean, said she was going to give up the men in her life so she could be with me. She never did. She chose them every single time. I can’t even talk about my dad letting me down because I’ve never seen him. I don’t know who he is. God knows he’s not flinging himself onto DNA databases, either because he’s a criminal or because he knows he hasan illegitimate kid out there somewhere. I never had people who stuck with me. Ben is just another one in a long line. But Sam has been there. From the beginning. I’ve never wanted to jeopardize that.”
She thought of the way he’d looked at her last night. All hurt and fury.
She’d jeopardized it, and she knew it.
“He’s mad at me,” she said, her voice sounding small.
It reminded her of being a child. Of the way disappointment had sounded in her voice all those years ago.
My mom didn’t show up, did she?
“What do you mean?” Daisy asked.
“Last night, I went back to his house. I said something about sleeping on the couch, and it got really tense. Because we did almost kiss last night. I wanted to pretend it didn’t happen, but it was impossible.”
“Oh dear.”
“I just don’t get why he couldn’t leave it. We were fine.” Her heart clenched tight when she thought about his face. His anger. His hurt.
