Chapter I.
Sammy had spent the better part of her twenties building a life that hummed with quiet achievement. She worked in the kind of space where people came not just to be entertained but to belong, though she rarely thought of it in such sentimental terms. It was a job that suited her—equal parts precision and chaos, demanding enough to keep her distracted without driving her to jump off a bridge at times.
She had a way of moving through the world that made her seem effortless, though anyone paying attention would have noticed the cracks: the way she barely touched her dinner at staff drinks, or how she kept an emergency Seroquel in every bag she owned.
Her place was constantly clean in a way that suggested detachment rather than pride, a place that still bore traces of a life she’d outgrown. The bookshelves were half-empty, though not for lack of books—she’d given most of them away during the divorce, not out of spite but out of exhaustion. She liked how the space felt weightless now, stripped of its both intellectual and sentimental clutter; since she always thought that nobody wanted to read that much Camille Paglia. The flowers helped, too, bright and temporary, just like her.
Dan had slipped into her life so quietly it was almost unsettling. She could never remember how he’d looked at her on his first day working at Clapper’s where she spearheaded all sorts of entertainment offered, but with her assumption, his expression was so assured it bordered on arrogance, as if he already knew how it would all unfold. With him, it was seamless—no fumbling, no pretense. They didn’t fall together so much as slot into place, as natural as muscle memory.
But the past has a way of lingering, dragging itself forward like a train car hitched to the wrong engine. Dan didn’t talk about it much, and Sammy never asked, but she could feel it sometimes, a faint shadow stretching over them. It didn’t bother her, not really; it was too far away to be threatening. Still, she’d wonder, in the quiet hours between one distraction and the next, how long it would take for it to fade.
