“I mean, I’m working for money,” I say. “It’s just that Ryder’s keeping all of it til Jamie’s debt is repaid.” The waiter pours me more coffee, not even waiting til my cup is empty, which on the one hand I appreciate as being attentive, but on the other I think is less about his effectiveness as a server and more about the fact that Sunrise is kind of quiet for a Saturday. Being a server, I realized last night, is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Balancing a tray of drinks through a maze of customers or even just hearing people’s orders over the music and the talking is serious work. I was on my feet in heels for basically six hours straight.
Except for the part, of course, when I was sitting on Ryder’s desk. You can’t really keep your shoes on if your jeans are coming off.
“Does Sebastian know about this?” Savannah says, and the mention of his name shakes me right out of any memory of last night with Ryder.
I take a small bite of my omelette, and chew it as long as humanly possible. “Not exactly.”
Savannah sits back in her chair, sips her coffee with both hands. “What’s going on?” Her blond ponytail, the same length but curlier than my own, falls over her shoulder as she shakes her head, examining me.
“What do you mean?”
“Cassie, I’m a lawyer,” she says. “I’m paid to call out when people are trying to be deceptive. Add that to the fact that I’ve known you, like, half your life, and I think I can safely say: something’s up.” She punctuates the point with another stab of French toast and bacon.
I haven’t really told anyone what happened with Sebastian. Jamie hasn’t asked. I told my mom that I was just here to collect some of my stuff from the house, and while I didn’t say I was going back, I also didn’t say I wasn’t.
But Savannah isn’t just anyone. I swallow, and take a long slow blink, trying to hang on to this one, last pre-truth moment, because once you say something out loud, it’s real. “It’s over. I left him.”
“Oh, God, Cass,” Savannah says. She reaches across the table for my hand. “Like on-a-break over or over-over?”
“Over-over.” It’s scary but actually a relief finally to be putting this information out into the world. Until right now, I don’t think I had realized how much tension I’d created in my body keeping this stuff to myself all this time, like trying to wear shoes every day that are too tight.
“What happened?”
I run my index finger up and down the rounded handle of my coffee mug and look out the window. The restaurant has a back patio, white wooden tables on brick, surrounded by grass as green as a golf course in Augusta. Even in shorts and a tank top, it’s too hot today to sit out there, but there’s something so appealing about the emptiness of that space, like it’s still untouched, unmarred by anything anyone could do. It’s still perfect, which is how things are before you try them, how people are before you love them, or think you love them. I sigh. “It just didn’t work out.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
I shrug. “I guess I felt like I had gotten myself into that situation, you know, deciding to move to England with him so quickly, so I needed to be the one to get myself out of it. That it wasn’t anyone else’s problem but mine.”
“No,” Savannah says, shaking her head. “Your problems are my problems. That’s how being friends works.”
“I felt bad,” I say. “I felt like, you know, I’d let us fall out of touch. Like I couldn’t just out of the blue ring you up after a year and be like, Oh, hey, I know it’s been a while, but I made a big mistake and can you help me fix my life?”
Savannah laughs. “That’s basically the script for every call I get from clients.”
“But that’s exactly why I didn’t want to make that call,” I say. “I didn’t want to be just some client you have to bail out.”
“Cassie,” Savannah says, leaning across the table, “if there’s something I know about you, it’s that you can take care of yourself. Remember that time in tenth grade when Natalie Burch stole your chemistry journal at the end of the year and turned it into Mrs. Von Peeble as her own?”
“Oh my gosh,” I say, smiling. “I can’t believe you even remember that.”
“Of course I do. Natalie sat next to me in lab. Every experiment she’d done the whole year had proved that energy and matter actually can be created and destroyed, and then somehow she got an A on her notebook grade.”
“I had to recreate the whole notebook for the entire year in, like, a couple weeks so I could something to turn in or I was going to fail.”
“And you made a perfect new notebook,” Savannah says, pointing a forkful of French toast at me.
“And Natalie got caught.”
“She’s probably in some women’s prison right now, trying to cheat Big Bertha at Uno between latrine duty shifts,” Savannah says.
“Actually, I think I heard that she has, like, three kids and lives in Hog Mountain.”
Savannah waves her hand. “Same thing. The point is, you’re resilient.”
“But this isn’t just recreating a chemistry notebook,” I say. “This is recreating my whole life.”
“You’re a problem solver. You get shit figured out. Jamie fucks up, you save his ass. You’re negotiating with Ryder Cole,” she says. The waiter, our new coffee BFF, refills our mugs. “I mean, no one fucking negotiates with Ryder Cole. Or at least lives to tell about it anyway.”
The waiter and I stare at Savannah, eyes widened.