“Really?” she asks.
“Apparently he told me all about it in the voicemail.”
“Why did you delete that?” she asks, looking appalled.
I shrug. “It felt right at the time.”
“But you totally misconstrued that entire situation,” she says. “What else did he tell you?”
I bite my thumbnail again, not sure I want to tell her the next part. “And Ella Abbott apparently went with him because she wanted to. He didn’t poach her.”
Her eyes widen. The coffee maker beeps, and she ignores it.
“You can’t hate him now,” she says.
“I feel . . . confused.”
She nods, slowly, an understanding look on her face. “Classic schema rigidity,” she says. “It’s when your brain has built a story and now it doesn’t want to update it.”
I tilt my head. “You learned that from two semesters of therapist school?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I saw it on a TikTok last week.”
I glare at her.
She ignores it. “Regardless, that’s probably what’s happening. Give it some time. You’ll get used to the idea.”
“It’s hard, though,” I say. “It changes everything.”
“It does,” she says. “But maybe when you let that go, he could be a contender for kiss number fifty.”
Thank goodness I don’t have my coffee yet, or I’d have done a spit take.
“Are you kidding?”
“Not even a little. He’s fine.” She fans herself. “You should definitely kiss him.”
“There are rules, Sam,” I remind her.
She scrunches her face, like she’s trying to recall them. “The work one?”
“Yes, no kissing coworkers.”
“But he’s not a coworker.”
“He’s a colleague that I’m now working with,” I say. “And even more importantly, I’m not interested in kissing Luke. I’ve got . . . that brain thingy going on.”
“Schema rigidity,” she says. “Get over it. Or at least let me kiss him. One of us needs to.”
“Neither of us is kissing Luke,” I say.
My phone rings, and I grab it from the counter, but not before Sam catches the name on the screen, her eyebrows shooting up.
“Jerkwad?” she asks.
“Shhhhh,” I say before answering.
“Hi, Luke,” I say into the phone.
