Page 66 of The Devil She Knows
Her chest ached, hollow with a ghostly grief. Grief that wasn’t hers, the loss not, either, but she felt shades of it all the same.
Delicately, Daphne cleared her throat.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Daphne turned her head and smiled sadly at Sam. “Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken.’ I get it. What you were trying to do. Go back to where you think it went wrong and make a different choice, but, Sam.” She shook her head. “Life is nothing but a series of choices, paths constantly diverging. That’s what this is.” She gestured to the screen. “All those different choices you could’ve made, infinite possibilities.”
Sam’s eyes flitted over the screen like a stained-glass window into a hundred different lives. She searched for the road that led to a happily ever after with Hannah and couldn’t find it.
“There’s more,” Daphne said, as if again sensing the direction of Sam’s thoughts. She waved her hand, and the screen changed, one hundred different videos, one hundreddifferent lives. Sam picked one and watched it for a moment, watched the CliffsNotes version of a life that could have been hers play out in front of her. A life where Sam had taken Hannah’s advice and quit her job at Glut, found work in a different restaurant as head pastry chef. She still worked long hours, but she found time, made time to go to the places Hannah wanted. She scraped and saved and bought her a bigger, better ring, and when she proposed Hannah said yes. She did everything right except the truly nonnegotiable sorts of things she’d done as Hannah’s perfect partner, the things that Sam would never do. She did everything right. Yet Sam watched as Hannah and Coco met clandestinely every week, watched as a bedroom door closed behind them, sparing her from seeing the truly gory bits play out.
“She’s never going to choose me, is she?” Sam swept a knuckle under her eye, but there were no tears to dry. She’d known the answer before she’d asked the question. Before she watched a hundred different lives play out on the big screen. “Me, not somebody who looks like me, has my face, I mean.” Sam tapped her fingertips against her chest. “Me.”
Daphne turned, their knees knocking. She dropped her hand to the chaise beside Sam’s, close enough to feel the phantom touch of her pinky. “I know you probably don’t believe me—”
“No. I … I think I do.” She shook her head. Thinking implied uncertainty, and Sam was certain. “I do.”
Her fifth wish had been nothing but a last-ditch, grasping effort to resuscitate something that had died a long time ago. Not her relationship with Hannah—although maybe that,too—but something inside her. Her belief that Hannah was the one. Thatthe onefor her even existed.
Sam hadn’t wanted to admit it. Admitting it meant she’d gambled her soul for a woman who at the end of every road would never choose her.
