Page 2 of The Devil She Knows
Sam caught her reflection in the elevator’s smudgy mirror and cringed. Her face was drawn, her cheeks hollow, her already deep-set eyes heavy. She looked like death warmed over. Actually, no. She was pretty sure there were corpses out there that looked livelier than her.
No wonder Hannah didn’t want to marry her.
“Didn’t sleep great, I guess.”
Mrs. Nelson tutted softly and pressed the button for the thirteenth floor, sparing Sam the trouble of reaching through the throng of bodies. “Where’s Hannah tonight?”
She opened her mouth, only for nothing to come out. She imagined saying the words, each imagined confession increasingly honest, vulnerable, nausea inducing.
We broke up.
Hannah ended things.
I proposed, and Hannah said no.
I put my heart in my hands and asked her for forever, and Hannah asked me to move out.
Mrs. Nelson would look at her,throughher, watery gray eyes sympathetic, and demand Sam come over for tea, straightaway, late hour be damned. She’d ply Sam with tea and cookies, trying to get her to open up, and—Sam wasn’t ready for that. She wasn’t ready to talk about tonight, because talking about it would make it real, and Sam … all Sam wanted was to crawl under the covers of the California king she’d shared with Hannah for the last two years and live in delusion for just a little longer. Cling to the hope she’d been bursting with at breakfast, buoyed by the idea that tonight was going to be the first night of the rest of their lives. She ached to pretend for just a little longer that when she woke up, tucked beneath the five-hundred-thread-count sheets Hannah had waffled over for weeks, everything would be okay. That this night was nothing more than a bad dream, a living, breathing nightmare.
“On vacation,” she said, forcing the words up and over the boulder-size lump in her throat. “She’ll be in Rhode Island for the next few days.”
I know this is sudden, so I’m not going to ask you to be out by the first. I’ll give you until the seventh, Hannah had said, already standing, reaching for the wool coat draped across the back of her chair.
Sam hadn’t argued. Beyond the fact that her name wasn’t on the lease, she literally hadn’t been able to make her mouthwork, her mind racing but her vocal cords paralyzed by … confusion? Shock? She’d stared up at Hannah, hunched low in her seat, wondering how she’d fucked up so badly that the love of her life wanted her so desperately out of hers.
Mr. Nelson, Mrs. Nelson’s lovable grumpy bear husband, harrumphed. “Withoutyou?”
Hannah took vacations without Sam all the time. Trips with her friends to Miami, to musical festivals in Chicago and Ojai, to Vail to go skiing. The one time Sam had joined Hannah and her friends for a weekend getaway upstate, she’d unknowingly maxed out her credit card within the first four hours. Humiliating hadn’t begun to describe it.
“I couldn’t get the time off.” The lie tasted sour in her mouth, like bad milk.
Mrs. Nelson tutted again. “You work too hard.”
Sam offered up a wan smile. Not hard enough, apparently. The more hours she worked to afford to keep up with the sort of lifestyle Hannah deserved, the more exhausted she became, the less time and energy she had to go to the places or take the sort of trips Hannah wanted. It was an impossible predicament, a catch-22. Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
It wouldn’t be, if her difficult boss would just pull her head out of her ass and look in-house for the new executive pastry chef at Glut. Oh, but,no, Coco Duquette, Glut’s chef de cuisine, remained fixed in her belief that there was someone better out there to take Michel’s place after he retired. Someone better than Sam.
Coco had had it in for her since Sam’s first day at Glut, back when Coco was only second-in-command in the kitchenand not yet in charge of hiring. Sam was too young, too green, and she hadn’t studied under the right chefs, Coco had complained, sneering down her nose, always finding some aspect of Sam’s technique to critique. Most humiliating, Coco had loved to force Sam to repeat herself two, three, even four times before acting as if comprehension had finally dawned on her.It’s not my fault you sound like you just crawled out of a swamp.
Even Sam, who hated conflict with a passion and preferred to let rudeness roll off her like water off a duck’s back, had a breaking point.Si vous ne comprenez pas mon anglais, préférez-vous que je parle français, Chef?she’d replied, happy to speak in a language Cococouldunderstand.
As it turned out, despite the haughty way she liked to drop herr’s and link her words, Coco Duquette—assuming that was even her name—had only the most basic grasp of the French language, unlike Sam, who’d been studying it since kindergarten.
After that, it didn’t matter how talented Sam was or how hard she worked, or that she arrived early and stayed late. It didn’t matter that the dishshe’dconceived had earned Glut its first Michelin star. With a single sentence uttered in French, Sam had made an enemy of Coco.
A grudge like that wasn’t easily overcome. The harder she tried to make nice, the worse Coco saw fit to punish her, spite unfortunately making fools of them both each time Coco tried to sabotage her with critical ingredients mysteriously missing from the pantry, orders never delivered to the kitchen, the blame landing squarely on Sam’s shoulders.
Coco wanted her gone, and she wasn’t going to rest until Sam was out the door.
Still, like an idiot, she clung to the hope that Coco would get over herself. That she’d wake up one day and realize that sabotaging Sam wasn’t serving anyone. That she’d stop being petty, bury the hatchet, and offer her the promotion.
Maybe Hannah was right. Maybe Sam was delusional.
After an eternity of nauseating stop-starts that had Sam wishing she’d braved the stairs, the elevator reached the ninth floor and Mrs. Nelson patted Sam on the arm.
“You, missy, are coming over on your next day off. No excuses.” She wagged a finger, and wisely, Sam kept her mouth shut. “Bring Hannah if you’d like. But you are going to take it easy, even if it takes forcing you to do it in front of me.”
The doors closed, sparing Sam from making a false promise, a small favor on a night that hadn’t offered her any semblance of mercy. She didn’t have the heart or the guts to tell Mrs. Nelson she’d be out of the building inside of a week. That she didn’t know where she’d be. Couch surfing, if she was lucky. On a bus back to Iberville Parish if she wasn’t.
