Page 118 of Smoke and Glitter

"I called him. The whole thing took about four minutes."

I stare at Sam. "Three years."

"Pretty much."

"For four minutes."

His mouth twists. "Wasn't my finest moment."

Despite myself, a breath of laughter slips out of me.

Sam looks down at his coffee. "He signed. Then a few days later he showed up at Vibes with the originals."

I lower my cup. "He came to Vibes?"

"Yeah. First time I'd seen him in three years."

That takes a second to absorb. "Why did he come?"

"I think he wanted to apologize to my face." Sam drags his thumb along the edge of the lid. "He tried."

"And?"

"I wasn't interested."

There's something very Sam about how flatly he says it. I can picture him standing behind that locked door with three years of anger between them and absolutely no intention of making the other man feel better about any of it.

"What happened?"

"Not much. He handed me the papers. I was ready for him to leave." Sam shifts in his chair. "Then he looked past me into Vibes."

I wait while he turns the cup slowly between his palms.

"He asked if I built it. Asked if I had a partner. When I told him no, he said he should've guessed."

"Why?"

"I asked him the same thing." Sam looks down at the table for a moment. "He said I'd always taken everything on myself. Before our place. Before any of what happened with him and Elise. If something needed doing, I usually did it before anybody got the chance to help."

There's no affection in Sam's face when he talks about him, but the anger is different now. Older. Less sharp around the edges.

"He wasn't trying to make some point about me," Sam says. "He knew me a long time. He remembered something I didn't."

I turn my cup between my hands. "Which was?"

"That I was doing this shit before I had anybody to blame for it."

His eyes meet mine.

"I spent three years treating what they did like it explained everything about who I am now. It explains some of it. A lot of it, probably." Sam rubs his palm once over his beard. "But I was already the guy who would rather handle something himself than ask somebody else to carry it."

He pauses, his fingers settling against the cup again.

"What happened didn't create that. It just gave me a damn good reason to stop questioning it."

I sit quietly across from him.

This is different from hearing what Elise did. Different from another story about the business falling apart. Sam isn't telling me what happened to him.