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“You can ask her yourself,” she says, looking over my head to something behind me. Whipping her hand into the air, she calls, “Sadie, hey. Look who's back in town.”
Turning in my seat to greet my old friend, I fight hard to keep my shock at seeing her from showing on my face. She looks so different from how I remember her.
She's always been beautiful, with her eyes an unusual shade of hazel and flawless tawny skin that she inherited from her Nigerian mother. But she was only sixteen when I left town, trapped somewhere in the limbo between girl and woman.
Now, in shoes with red soles and a pencil-cut dress, her hair tumbling in thick glossy waves over her shoulders, there's no trace of girlhood left about her. What really makes me pause, though, is the shadow of pain in her eyes that lingers like a cloud of the darkest gray.
She isn't okay.
“Oh, hey, Thea,” Sadie says. “I heard you were back.”
“Let me guess…Mrs. Patchouli?” I answer with a smile in a fruitless attempt to relieve some of the awkward tension that has settled in the air.
“Among others.”
I don't have time to balk at the frankness of her tone, because Leighton pulls out an empty chair at our three-man table and asks, “Wanna join us?”
Sadie throws a wary look in my direction before coming to a hesitant decision. “Yeah, okay.” She takes the empty chair, one leg moving to cross over the other.
“How you doing?” Leighton asks, leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands.
“Cheating husband nearly dies the night I'm planning to confront him about his affair and now the asshole's in a coma. You know, all the normal shit people deal with.”
My eyes widen at her words and I scramble to find something to say but ultimately come up short. Leighton, by the looks of things, is having the same problem. Her mouth is agape and her eyelids blink almost comically, as if that was the last thing she ever expected Sadie to say.
“Oh please“—Sadie rolls her eyes—“I know you've both heard all about it, or else you wouldn't have looked at me like my dog died the moment I walked in here.”
“Fair enough.” Leighton spoons a thick glob of whipped cream into her mouth, talking around it. “You holding up okay?”
“I don't know.” Sadie shrugs and drops her eyes to the table, inspecting a flaw in the woodgrain before rubbing at it with her thumb. “We've been together since we were kids and he's my son's daddy, ya know? He's all I've ever known. And I kind of just think that if he pulls through, if he could just wake up, then we'll be okay. We can deal with all the other bullshit later. But then, there's still a part of me that wants him to die for what he did to me.”
“I get that,” I whisper.
Two sets of surprised eyes turn to stare at me.
“What?”
“I know what it's like to love someone but hate them at the same time. It's shit.”
“Um, Thea?” Leighton says. “I don't think Sadie wants to hear about your Cole drama right now.”
I roll my eyes. “I'm not talking about Cole.”
“Then who?”
I ignore her. “Sadie, I'm not pretending to know what you're going through. Seriously, I can't even begin to imagine it. But I know how it feels when someone close to you does something unforgiveable and how frustrating it is to carry on loving them anyway. I wish we could just switch it off. It'd be so much easier, ya know?”
My hands rub together furiously beneath the table as I speak, feeling more exposed than I have in a long time. “I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're allowed to feel your feelings. If one moment you're wishing he was dead and the next you're praying that he wakes up, it's all okay.”
For a while, nobody says anything. The silence stretches for so long that I'm convinced I should've just kept my mouth shut.
“Sorry,” I whisper, staring down at my lap. “I shouldn't have said anything.”
But then, long fingers wrap around my arm and I look up into Sadie's gentle gaze. “Thank you.” She smiles, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. “I know what you mean.”
The atmosphere relaxes after that. For an hour at least, the three of us talk and laugh like we did when we were young. We don't speak more of Clay, or even Cole, though Leighton curses Crew several times simply for existing in the world, much to Sadie's and my amusement.
“Hey, Thea?” Leighton asks afterward, as we stand together on the sidewalk outside the café. “Can I ask you something?”
