“I feel like I did as muchbetterthan my parents as I could. I’m not an addict, I support myself. I have friends. That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah. It’s a good thing. But—”
“We weren’t talking about me,” he said. “You keep doing that. You keep making it about somebody else.”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just my own sadness. We can go over it and over it, but it isn’t going to change anything.” Her throat suddenly went tight. Grief was like an anvil pressing on her chest. “It won’t make me understand it any better. I wanted to believe that this was happily ever after. I wanted to believe that I changed. But I’m stuck again. Just being a foster kid. Somebody who gets abandoned. You can’t outrun it, I guess. It’s always going to be waiting there in the shadows. Looking for a chance to swing on you.”
“Or,” he said, “and hear me out—Ben sucks.”
It wasn’t funny, but she laughed anyway. “This is getting dangerously close toI told you so.”
“It isn’t, though. Because what I’m telling you right now is you’re wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with you. Maybe there are certain blind spots that you have.”
“Here we go,” she said.
They were getting close to Soraya’s house, though, so the conversation would have to end.
“What? You don’t think you have any blind spots?”
“I think you were just taking the long road to do exactly what I thought you were going to do.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But maybe some things need to be said so you’ll finally believe me when I tell you I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, and you don’t seem to believe that.”
He snorted. “Waiting for empirical evidence.”
“Same. Same.”
They finished the rest of the drive in silence, and when they pulled up to the house, there was an actual moving truck Daisy was standing next to, looking perplexed.
“Oh.” Nora slid out of the truck. “I thought we were doing this incrementally.”
“So did I,” Daisy said. “It’s kind of a ... It’s a long story.”
Then the cab of the truck opened, and Zach Woods, famous, hot as a house fire, got out.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi.” He stuck his hand out. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“No. I’m Nora. You’re Zach Woods. Of course I know who you are.”
“I don’t need you to do that.” He looked almost comedically uncomfortable for a man who must get recognized all the time. Nora wasn’t one to be starstruck, but she also wasn’t one to pretend to be deliberately unimpressed just to be cool, which was about the most try-hard thing a human could do.
“I’m not doing anything, I promise. I just thought it would be dumb if I pretended I didn’t know who you were. This is Sam.” She gestured to him.
Sam didn’t look impressed or starstruck, and she knew him well enough to know that wasn’t a bit. If anything, he looked irritated by the whole thing, though she couldn’t imagine why. “Nice to meet you,” he said, whatever irritation he felt locked down deep enough that probably only Nora could see it.
“I ran into Zach at the coffee shop this morning,” Daisy said. “I told him what was happening, and then he just took charge, and before I knew it, he’d rented a truck.”
Sam and Nora both swiveled their heads to look at Zach, who shrugged. “It just seems like basic courtesy. I could get the truck, and quick. She needed help.”
The way he said it made it sound so practical.
“We were piecing together solutions.” Daisy sounded arch and annoyed.
“Which is fine. But you could take the big, already-put-together solution.” Zach’s words were definitive.
