“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “So what if she’s in SF? It’s a big city, and we’re not friends.”
Not anymore.
Once upon a time, Sammy and Olivia had been best friends. Lovers. Dreamers. They’d shared and held each other’s hopes and wishes in their hands and woven a glittering tapestry of what the future would look like. But when those hopes and wishes changed, the threads frayed, and the discordance stretched the tapestry thin until the fabric tore, ripping itself and its owners apart.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Sammy said before Jessica could push him further on the subject. “Like your well-deserved promotion, which is why we’re here.”
Deflection: the world’s greatest weapon.
A grin spread across Jessica’s face. “One step closer to partner.”
“You deserve it.”
Sammy flashed a genuine smile. Jessica was a killer lawyer, famous among Silicon Valley’s movers and shakers for her sharp instincts and talent for reading people. She worked harder than most people Sammy knew, and she’d been promoted after helping her firm’s most important client—a major tech company—win a massive legal fight against the European Union. If she kept going at this rate, she’d make partner before she turned thirty-five.
They clinked glasses, and Sammy downed his sake in one smooth gulp.
He’d missed Jessica’s official celebratory dinner because of a last-minute emergency at the bakery. She’d insisted it was fine, but he’d been adamant about treating her to a make-up dinner.
He just hadn’t expected to run into his ex-girlfriend at the same restaurant.
What were the odds?
Then again, Sammy shouldn’t be surprised. Food was Olivia’s weakness, and she was always on the hunt for great new restaurants. He still remembered her spreadsheets crammed with information about various establishments—the type of cuisine, price point, number of Yelp stars, signature dishes, and additional notes (awards, dress code, cash only, etc). It was both impressive and terrifying.
Ishikawa was the city’s latest culinary hotspot, so of course Olivia would be here. With a date.
The server returned with their food, and Sammy dug into his noodles with a frown. Her date had left soon after she did, and he’d seemed too intoxicated to realize the woman he’d arrived with had ditched him while he’d been in the restroom.
When did Olivia start going out with overgrown frat boys who couldn’t keep their drinks down and their shirts on? Why did Sammy care?
I don’t.Sammy stabbed a piece of beef with his fork while Jessica talked about the new case she was working on. Luckily, she didn’t mention Olivia again for the rest of dinner, and their conversation topics stayed in neutral territory.
The first time Sammy introduced Jessica as his girlfriend had been at his Fourth of July barbecue three years ago, and it’d taken a helluva lot of convincing before she agreed to the ruse. Neither she nor his best friend Nardo Crescas—who’d grown up with Jessica and had connected her with Sammy after she moved to California—had approved of him faking a girlfriend to get under Olivia’s skin.
To be fair, such gameswerechildish, but Sammy had been so rattled by being around Olivia again after years of avoiding her that he hadn’t been thinking straight. His bakery had had a pop-up in New York that summer, and he’d temporarily moved to NYC to serve as the face of the new venture. It’d been easy to sidestep Farrah’s efforts to throw him and Olivia together when they lived on opposite sides of the country; it was nearly impossible when they were in the same city. Jessica happened to be in town that weekend for work—yes, work during Fourth of July—and had reluctantly agreed to play the part of his girlfriend.
Not that it mattered. Olivia hadn’t blinked an eye—not then, and not the second time around, when Sammy brought Jessica as his plus one to Farrah and Blake’s wedding. That time, it’d been to ensure he didn’t do anything stupid, as people were wont to do when they were drunk at a wedding and in close proximity with the ex-love of their life.
By the time dinner ended, Sammy had sunk into a brooding silence. If Jessica noticed, she didn’t say anything.
“Thanks for dinner.” Jessica wound her scarf around her neck. Unless there was a heatwave, San Francisco evenings were substantially chillier than its afternoons—a fact that always surprised tourists who came to the Bay Area expecting the same hot, sunny weather as in Southern California. “You really didn’t have to.”
“I wanted to.” Sammy’s phone buzzed with an incoming call. When he saw the name on the screen, his blood iced over.
Olivia.
She hadn’t called him in nearly a decade. It was like he’d conjured her call simply by thinking of her throughout dinner.
Or had she been thinking about him after they ran into each other?
“Who is it?” Jessica asked.
“No one.” The call ended, replaced with a missed call notification. “You want a ride home?”
“Nah, I’m meeting Mara for drinks. You can join us if you’d like.”
“Thanks, but I’m gonna call it a night.” He hugged her. “Congrats again. Don’t forget us little people once you make it big.”