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Like I’m afraid.
“—and I’m scared,” I confess, and tears rush to my eyes, pouring down my face, while Sonya wraps her arms around me and hugs me and murmurs, “Hey, girl. We all are.”
She holds me for a long time while I cry it out, murmuring more comfort. Eventually I have to pull away or I’ll get snot and tears on Sonya’s silk blouse. She insists she doesn’t care, that it’s going to the dry cleaner later today, and she digs in her purse and pulls out one of those small plastic packs of tissues, which she hands me. I get myself under control, and she says, “You know, Quinn and I almost broke up. He almost went back to Boston.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, we realized we wanted to be with each other more than we wanted to hang on to our baggage, I guess? Oh!” she cries suddenly as her handbag begins to play Meghan Trainor’s “Badass Woman.” “Hang on—that’s Hanna calling from the Bat Phone.”
“There’s a Bat Phone?”
“I mean, not literally—there are no bats or bat-people in this scenario—but yeah, that’s Hanna’s emergency ringtone. Hey,” she says, answering.
Her face goes absolutely white. “No,” she says. “Oh, fuck.” She listens some more. “Yeah, actually, she’s…here. And yeah. I can tell her.”
She hangs up and looks at me. Her eyes are huge.
“What is it?” I ask, my stomach curdling.
“I don’t even know how to tell you this,” she says.
“Just tell me,” I say. “Rip off the Band-Aid.”
Her phone pings, and she looks down at it. Hangs her head.
“Sonya?”
She holds up her phone. It’s the front page of a celebrity news site. There’s a photo at the top of the page under the headline A Hot Day for January. I squint at it. It takes a moment to figure out what I’m seeing. A gorgeous woman in a passionate clinch with a handsome man.
“That’s January Stark,” I say.
“Yeah,” Sonya says bleakly.
“And that’s…”
We stare at each other as the full weight of what I’m seeing sinks in.
Sonya finishes the sentence for me. “Definitely not Tobias Bauer.”
Hanna has her head down on her desk. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her in what looks like despair.
She lifts her head when Sonya knocks quietly on the door frame.
“Oh,” Hanna says. “Hi. I wasn’t expecting you…”
She aims that at me.
“I wanted to see if I could do anything to help,” I say.
“You don’t owe me anything.” Her face is bleak, her words taut. “You’ve done too much already, and—I’m so sorry about the way things turned out with Shane. I thought…”
But she doesn’t finish the sentence.
“I’m not very good at knowing what people are feeling,” she says instead. “But you don’t need to be here. You don’t need to help.”
“I know.” I sit in one of the chairs across from her. “Sonya and I already went over this on the way over. I’m not here because I feel like I owe anyone anything. I’m here because I want to help.” I look from Sonya to Hanna and back again. I think of the morning when Sonya and her friends pitched in to make me over for the fake proposal. Of the day Hanna and company spent finding a wedding dress for me. And the bachelorette party no one was obligated to throw me, the one that made me feel for the first time in a long while like I belonged.
I’ve lost Shane—but I don’t have to lose everything.
