Shock renders us speechless for a moment, and Katherine recovers first. “Hey! Moron! You forgot the passengers!”
She starts to run after it but slips on the snow. I grab her arm to steady her. “Katherine.” My voice is steadier than I feel. “Please tell me that you checked the license plate of that car. To make sure it matched the one in the app?”
It’s a rhetorical question because I’d bet my luggage she didn’t check. Oh, wait. I don’t have any luggage.
Katherine takes a long, deep breath. “Okay. It’s okay. It’s going to be fine. The roads are still icy, he’s not going to get anywhere fast. Call the cops, tell them what happened.”
It’s my turn for a long, deep breath. “I don’t have my phone, Katherine. Or my wallet. They were both in my briefcase.”
Along with an engagement ring.
I can’t think about that right now. “Give me your phone. I’ll call. You’ll just start to yell.”
She doesn’t move.
“Katherine. Don’t tell me—”
“My phone’s in my purse.”
“Why the hell would you put your purse in the trunk!”
“I was trying to make a point!” she yells back. “That I could go without my phone!”
I—
I can’t with that right now. So I ignore it.
I tilt my head back to the sky. “Damn it. This is so you.”
“What exactly is so me? Putting my luggage into a strange car?” She hunches her shoulders and shivers. “Believe it or not, this is a first.”
“Not that,” I say, looking back at her. “You make everything about you. You never stop, not once, to see who you might be affecting. It’s always what you want to do, a point you were trying to make. Your career. Your goals. Your agenda.”
“You seriously want to talk about agenda right now? Tell me, Tom, where were we headed? Oh yeah, Chicago, which I can assure you hasn’t been on my holiday agenda for a long time. And why were we going to Chicago again?”
I cross my arms. “Because my family lives there, and it’s Christmas. I shouldn’t have to defend wanting to spend the holidays with my family.”
“Ah. But that’s not why we have to get there by Christmas Eve. Is it, Tom?” Her voice is quiet, her gaze equally calm.
It’s the perfect opening to tell her the truth.
An opening I do not take.
THIRTY-ONE
KATHERINE
December 24, 7:32 a.m.
At some point, it becomes painfully clear that walking is our only option.
We make it five minutes.
Maybe ten.
My pace starts to slow.
The snowplow that came through earlier apparently decided to call it a day because the road ahead has snow up to my knees. And though I at least heeded Tom’s suggestion to wear booted heels instead of my stiletto heels, they’re suede, and my feet feel like ice.
Tom’s pace slows as well until we silently come to a stop. Without a word of smugness, Tom gently takes my arm and guides me toward the side of the road.
It’s started to snow, but it’s a gentle, pretty sort of snow. Of course, it won’t be so pretty the longer we’re out here. But I can’t think about that. Or how hopeless our situation feels right now.
Instead, I take a deep breath and hoist myself up awkwardly onto the guardrail. The metal is freezing cold, even through the fabric of my black pants, but at least it gets my feet out of the snow.
Tom sits beside me. I can’t quite bring myself to look at him.
Our situation is . . . not great.
And it’s my fault.
Even assuming that a car comes around in a minute or two and the driver is a Good Samaritan, we have nothing but the clothes on our bodies. Which doesn’t even include gloves because I tucked the pair I borrowed from Tom inside my purse while using my phone because they didn’t work on the touch screen.
I cross my arms and hug myself, breaking the silence. “I don’t suppose that someday we’ll look back at this and laugh?”
I wish I could bite back the question the second it slips out.
Even if we do look back and laugh someday in the distant future, Tom and I won’t be laughing together.
He’ll probably be telling his cute grandchildren about his fraught, frozen adventure on his way to propose to Grandma, and I’ll be . . . alone.
Instead of answering my lame question, he glances over at me. “Why are you not more upset about losing your phone?”
“I am. You just can’t tell because my face is frozen in place.” I try to smile, and it feels stiff. “Do I look like one of those plastic-surgery-gone-wrong pictures from Page Seven?”
“Six,” he says, dropping his chin and smiling. “Page Six. And frozen features aside, the Katherine I know would be vibrating with horror at not having her most precious possession. You’re not. Why?”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right, but I can’t deny that old me would have been losing her mind at being without her phone for even five minutes. And as much as I know people don’t change in the span of a single day, I can’t deny the fact that something has shifted over the course of the past twenty-four hours.
That my phone no longer feels like my most precious possession.
Tom doesn’t let me off the hook. “You’re not worried that Harry’s going to call with the call?”
I open my mouth with the knee-jerk instinct to tell him that of course I’m freaking out about missing the partner call that I’ve been waiting my entire adult life for.
But the truth? I haven’t even thought about how losing my phone means missing Harry’s phone call. Not until just now when Tom mentioned it.
The realization leaves me with an unsettled, untethered feeling. Who is Katherine Tate, Esquire, aspiring partner?
What does she stand for? What does she want?
I’m too afraid I know the answer to that last one. And that the correct question isn’t so much what does she want, but who?
Who do I want?
I already know. Just like I know I won’t get him.
I missed my chance with Tom. I’ve always known that. But until yesterday, I didn’t realize how much I wanted a do-over. A second chance.
I lift my frozen hands to my mouth and try to blow some warmth back into them. I half expect Tom to give me grief about losing his gloves along with everything else.
Instead, he slides off the guardrail and pivots to stand in front of me. Wordlessly, he reaches for my hands, bringing them between his much bigger palms, which somehow seem so much warmer than my own.
Tom begins rubbing my hands briskly, and though his gaze is locked on our joined hands rather than making eye contact, there’s a surprising intimacy to the action. And a kindness, too, that I’m not entirely sure I deserve.
“You hate me,” I say quietly. “Because I lost our bags.”
“Yes. And no.”
“Yes, you hate me. But not because I lost the bags?” I ask, studying his features.
His eyes flick up, meet mine. He winks, and before I can register just what that does to my insides, his gaze lowers back to our hands.
I don’t push it further because I know what that wink means. He doesn’t hate me. He just thinks that he should.
And then, because I think he should as well, I push it a little bit further.