“Hey, Snickers,” I whispered, reaching down to pet the Siamese. “I’ll come back to spend some time with you later.” I glanced over to where the girl sat, dejected. “I just have something I’ve got to do first, okay?”
Snickers looked up at me, conveying something like,Godspeed, Lucy.
Or, you know,Give me flaked tuna treats.
I approached the table with a little wave. “Hi,” I said, racking my brain for the name the girl put down when she booked the time slot. “It’s Becky, right?”
“Oh no,” she moaned, clocking my sympathetic expression. “Does everyone here know I got broken up with?”
“No, no, of course not,” I replied, which wasn’t really a lie, because there were only two customers here and the one in the back corner had their AirPods in.
I slid into the chair across from her.
“Listen, it’s going to be all right. Relationships end. That’s life,” I said. An old memory crossed my mind and something inside my chest twisted. “Sometimes we don’t even know why.”
“He said he met someone else.”
I cringed. Or sometimes wedidknow why.
“I’m so sorry. He doesn’t deserve you,” I said, making a mental note to give Becky a free bear claw on her way out. “But great things are going on happen to you, okay? Lots of great things.”
My eyes caught on Snickers, who’d followed me, still looking for attention. I leaned forward, wiggling my fingers over at Becky and directing Snickers’s attention over to her. “Here, pet the cat.”
Becky sniffled, looking confused. “What?”
“Pet the cat. It’s soothing,” I explained.
This sentence seemed to make sense to her, because she reached down and started stroking Snickers, who let out a pleasedbrrr.
“People leave,” I said. “But life goes on, and you figure out what else makes you happy. You, Becky, are going to do so much better than...” I waved a hand dismissively behind me. “What’s-His-Face. The Cat Café Mood Ruiner.”
“Todd.”
“Yeah. Todd! You don’t need him. You seem really nice,” I told her honestly, watching as Snickers tried to climb onto her lap and the gentle way Becky bent down to help her up. “And you’re going to be sad about it for a little bit, but you’re going to find someone else, if that’s what you want. Or you could focus on yourself too! Which is never a time-waster. Either way, it’s going to be okay.”
She nodded seriously.
“Soothing, right?” I added, nodding down at the way Becky was snuggling Snickers. “Are you feeling any better?”
“You know what? I actually am.”
“That’s great! See? You’re already—” I cut off mid-sentence, distracted by the sudden newsflash on TV. Becky turned around to look too.
“No one does it like US,” the gossip show host announced. “In the early hours of the morning, Jake Moody—one of the singers in the popular boy band the Usual Suspects—was caught swimming in the famous fountain of the elite Las Vegas hotel, the Gilded Pearl. Police arrived on the scene and escorted Moody away—but not before he signed a few autographs.”
The studio cut to footage from a field reporter’s camera, and then suddenly there was Jake. Swooping dark hair andhypnotic hazel-brown eyes. High cheekbones and a jawline as sharp as a knife—and enough swagger to suggest he was a pirate in another life.
I rolled my eyes but didn’t turn away.
On-screen, it was dark, and Jake stood in front of the iconic hotel fountain, fully dressed and soaking wet. His slick leather jacket shone against the camera flashes, and damp strands of his hair fell over his eyes, leaving beads of water on his long lashes. Policemen and reporters surrounded him, but he looked entirely unbothered. Bored, even. Like taking a dip in a famous off-limits fountain was simply a way to beat the summer heat.
“Jake Moody! Jake Moody!” reporters called out to him, all shouting at once. “Would you like to apologize? Or make a statement?”
“Yeah,” he said, slow and easy. “I’ll make a statement.”
He took a step forward and stared straight into the camera with a devious glint in his eyes. For a split second, I didn’t recognize him. An odd, mind-bending thing, considering how close we used to be.You haven’t spoken to him in four years, I reminded myself.This isn’t the boy you knew. Jake’s someone else now. Even his speaking voice sounds different.
Slowly but purposely, Jake leaned toward the microphone. A sly grin slipped across his face like quicksilver. “Stream the Usual Suspects’ latest single, ‘Midnight Swim.’”
