The Devil She Knows

1

It was stupid to focus on, insignificant in light of, well, everything, but Samantha Cooper's bent knee was beginning to ache.

"Marry you?" Hannah's eyes flitted around the room. "Sam, you're-you're kidding." The color drained from her face. "Oh God. You're not."

Sam's heart stuttered to a sluggish stop. "Is it . . . is it the ring?"

It was . . . dainty would be putting it delicately-all she could afford. But it would look so pretty, perfect on Hannah's slender finger.

"Is it the-" Hannah choked on what was either a sob or a laugh. "No. The ring is . . ." Her freckled nose scrunched, kick-starting Sam's heart into beating again. "Fine. That ring is fine."

"Oh." Good. That was good. Hannah thought the ring was fine. Hannah thought-

Oh.

This time last year, Christmas, Hannah had gifted her an immersion blender. A fancy fifteen-speed number Sam had been lusting after for months, too pricey to entertain purchasing on her paltry pastry chef budget. One with a blade guard and rubber handle and nonstick edge, cordless and easy to operate. Perfect for pureeing, emulsifying, blending, and blitzing. It had seen its fair share of use in the months since. Hannah's favorite soups. Her favorite protein shakes.

Now it felt like Hannah had taken that immersion blender and shoved it into Sam's chest, setting it to blast, turning her insides to pulp.

Proposing wasn't entirely out of left field, not some wild whim. They'd talked about this, the possibility of it, marriage. Granted, not in a while, but when they'd first started dating. Back then, everything about Hannah-from how beautiful she was to the sharp, sweet sound of her laugh-had turned Sam's brain to mush, rendering her speechless or giving her the worst case of verbal diarrhea, nothing in between. It was on their first, second maybe, date that she had blathered on about her parents, how in love they were, happily married for thirty-five years. How, one day, she wanted that for herself. Embarrassing stuff, honestly, but Hannah had smiled and said she'd always dreamed about having a big wedding.

Months later, Sam had stumbled on Hannah's Pinterest wedding board, thousands of pretty pinned images-diamond rings and big bouquets and satin wedding dresses. Irrefutable proof that they wanted the same things out of life, that they were on the same page.

Only now she wasn't sure if they were even reading from the same book, in the same language. Considering that, of all the ways she'd imagined her proposal playing out, Hannah dropping her head into her hands and hissing, "People are staring. I cannot believe you're putting me in this position," had not been among them.

People were staring. The older couple seated at the table across from them stared unrepentantly from behind their menus, leaning in, straining to hear over the dulcet tones of the harp being plucked in the corner of the dimly lit restaurant. Over by the bar, the maître d' and bartender whispered, and in the corner, a girl no older than fifteen held her phone aloft, recording. Before midnight, Samantha would be TikTok's latest viral sensation, the laughingstock of the internet.

She scrambled back into her chair. "Why don't we table this?"

"Table this?" Hannah's voice hitched, broadcasting Sam's shame to the entire restaurant. "I can't just . . . You proposed. Publicly, no less. Unless I'm mistaken, that means you want to . . ." Hannah looked the way Sam felt-like she was going to hurl. "Marry me."

That was generally what a proposal implied. "I do? Want to. Marry you, I mean. And you always said you liked public proposals. Your Pinterest boards are full of pictures of jumbotrons and-and skywriting. But if the timing isn't-"

Hannah laid a gentle hand atop hers, expression closer to contrite than Sam had ever seen it as she snapped the robin's-egg-blue box in Sam's sweaty hand shut, sparing them both the misery of continuing to stare at the itty-bitty diamond Sam had spent a small fortune on. "I don't want that."

No number of skinned knees, broken bones, paper cuts, and grease burns could hold a candle to the painful silence that followed.

"That's okay," she said, voice full of false cheer. A camera flash went off somewhere over her shoulder, causing them both to flinch. Wonderful. A picture for posterity. As if she had any desire to remember this moment. "What is marriage but a piece of paper anyway?"

A sharp pang of longing ricocheted through her chest, but she breathed through it.

All she really wanted was to spend the rest of her life with Hannah. What that life looked like didn't matter, only that they spent it together.

She tucked the ring box away, out of sight like it had never even existed. "Seriously. Consider it forgotten."

"It's not marriage, Sam." Hannah reached for the bottle of Dom and filled her glass to the brim with a put-upon sigh, pity swimming in her gray eyes. "It's you."


You’re not the girl I fell in love with, Sam. When I met you, you were going places. Places I wanted to go with you. But now you come home late every night, covered in flour, reeking of butter and God only knows what else you use in that kitchen. You never want to go anywhere or do anything. Nothing fun. You come home and you rot on the couch watching old episodes of that British baking show you’re obsessed with, and you know what? I’m pretty sure you love those damn cats of yours more than you claim to love me.

Don't even get me started on how you're delusional about the restaurant if you honestly think Coco's going to promote from in-house. It's never going to happen. I know it, and deep down, you know it, too, but you refuse to look for a job anywhere else. When we met, you had so much potential, and I'm not going to wait around a second longer and watch you continue to squander it.

"-am? Sam!"

She jolted, jumping a little at her name. If the way Mrs. Nelson looked a touch exasperated told her anything, her one gloved hand holding the elevator door, she'd been trying to get Sam's attention for a while.

"Sorry." She smiled sheepishly and squeezed inside the elevator. "I'm a space cadet tonight."

Mrs. Nelson smiled warmly, looking so much like Sam's grandmother in that moment that her heart squeezed. "You look tired, dear."

Sam caught her reflection in the elevator's smudgy mirror and cringed. Her face was drawn, her cheeks hollow, her already deep-set eyes heavy. She looked like death warmed over. Actually, no. She was pretty sure there were corpses out there that looked livelier than her.

No wonder Hannah didn't want to marry her.

"Didn't sleep great, I guess."

Mrs. Nelson tutted softly and pressed the button for the thirteenth floor, sparing Sam the trouble of reaching through the throng of bodies. "Where's Hannah tonight?"

She opened her mouth, only for nothing to come out. She imagined saying the words, each imagined confession increasingly honest, vulnerable, nausea inducing.

We broke up.

Hannah ended things.

I proposed, and Hannah said no.

I put my heart in my hands and asked her for forever, and Hannah asked me to move out.

Mrs. Nelson would look at her, through her, watery gray eyes sympathetic, and demand Sam come over for tea, straightaway, late hour be damned. She'd ply Sam with tea and cookies, trying to get her to open up, and-Sam wasn't ready for that. She wasn't ready to talk about tonight, because talking about it would make it real, and Sam . . . all Sam wanted was to crawl under the covers of the California king she'd shared with Hannah for the last two years and live in delusion for just a little longer. Cling to the hope she'd been bursting with at breakfast, buoyed by the idea that tonight was going to be the first night of the rest of their lives. She ached to pretend for just a little longer that when she woke up, tucked beneath the five-hundred-thread-count sheets Hannah had waffled over for weeks, everything would be okay. That this night was nothing more than a bad dream, a living, breathing nightmare.

"On vacation," she said, forcing the words up and over the boulder-size lump in her throat. "She'll be in Rhode Island for the next few days."

I know this is sudden, so I'm not going to ask you to be out by the first. I'll give you until the seventh, Hannah had said, already standing, reaching for the wool coat draped across the back of her chair.

Sam hadn't argued. Beyond the fact that her name wasn't on the lease, she literally hadn't been able to make her mouth work, her mind racing but her vocal cords paralyzed by . . . confusion? Shock? She'd stared up at Hannah, hunched low in her seat, wondering how she'd fucked up so badly that the love of her life wanted her so desperately out of hers.

Mr. Nelson, Mrs. Nelson's lovable grumpy-bear husband, harrumphed. "Without you?"

Hannah took vacations without Sam all the time. Trips with her friends to Miami, to musical festivals in Chicago and Ojai, to Vail to go skiing. The one time Sam had joined Hannah and her friends for a weekend getaway upstate, she'd unknowingly maxed out her credit card within the first four hours. Humiliating hadn't begun to describe it.

"I couldn't get the time off." The lie tasted sour in her mouth, like bad milk.

Mrs. Nelson tutted again. "You work too hard."

Sam offered up a wan smile. Not hard enough, apparently. The more hours she worked to afford to keep up with the sort of lifestyle Hannah deserved, the more exhausted she became, the less time and energy she had to go to the places or take the sort of trips Hannah wanted. It was an impossible predicament, a catch-22. Damned if she did, damned if she didn't.

It wouldn't be, if her difficult boss would just pull her head out of her ass and look in-house for the new executive pastry chef at Glut. Oh, but, no, Coco Duquette, Glut's chef de cuisine, remained fixed in her belief that there was someone better out there to take Michel's place after he retired. Someone better than Sam.

Coco had had it in for her since Sam's first day at Glut, back when Coco was only second-in-command in the kitchen and not yet in charge of hiring. Sam was too young, too green, and she hadn't studied under the right chefs, Coco had complained, sneering down her nose, always finding some aspect of Sam's technique to critique. Most humiliating, Coco had loved to force Sam to repeat herself two, three, even four times before acting as if comprehension had finally dawned on her. It's not my fault you sound like you just crawled out of a swamp.

Even Sam, who hated conflict with a passion and preferred to let rudeness roll off her like water off a duck's back, had a breaking point. Si vous ne comprenez pas mon anglais, préférez-vous que je parle français, Chef? she'd replied, happy to speak in a language Coco could understand.

As it turned out, despite the haughty way she liked to drop her r's and link her words, Coco Duquette-assuming that was even her name-had only the most basic grasp of the French language, unlike Sam, who'd been studying it since kindergarten.

After that, it didn't matter how talented Sam was or how hard she worked, or that she arrived early and stayed late. It didn't matter that the dish she'd conceived had earned Glut its first Michelin star. With a single sentence uttered in French, Sam had made an enemy of Coco.

A grudge like that wasn't easily overcome. The harder she tried to make nice, the worse Coco saw fit to punish her, spite unfortunately making fools of them both each time Coco tried to sabotage her with critical ingredients mysteriously missing from the pantry, orders never delivered to the kitchen, the blame landing squarely on Sam's shoulders.

Coco wanted her gone, and she wasn't going to rest until Sam was out the door.

Still, like an idiot, she clung to the hope that Coco would get over herself. That she'd wake up one day and realize that sabotaging Sam wasn't serving anyone. That she'd stop being petty, bury the hatchet, and offer her the promotion.

Maybe Hannah was right. Maybe Sam was delusional.

After an eternity of nauseating stop-starts that had Sam wishing she'd braved the stairs, the elevator reached the ninth floor and Mrs. Nelson patted Sam on the arm.

"You, missy, are coming over on your next day off. No excuses." She wagged a finger, and wisely, Sam kept her mouth shut. "Bring Hannah if you'd like. But you are going to take it easy, even if it takes forcing you to do it in front of me."

The doors closed, sparing Sam from making a false promise, a small favor on a night that hadn't offered her any semblance of mercy. She didn't have the heart or the guts to tell Mrs. Nelson she'd be out of the building inside of a week. That she didn't know where she'd be. Couch surfing, if she was lucky. On a bus back to Iberville Parish if she wasn't.

Alone inside the elevator, the brave face she'd pasted on crumbled, the tears she'd held back stinging her tired eyes, escaping to run hot and salty down her wind-chapped cheeks, Hannah's words playing over and over in an excruciating loop in her head.

You had so much potential, and I'm not going to wait around a second longer and watch you continue to squander it.

Hannah had opened Sam's eyes to a whole world of possibility that, for a middle-class girl from bumfuck nowhere, Louisiana, had simply never been on her radar. All she'd ever wanted was to get a world-class culinary education and have a quiet, content life managing a bakery, her own sweet little slice of patisserie heaven. If she was lucky, marry someone nice, someone who loved her as much as she loved them. She'd never dreamed of more, never imagined more could exist, but then Hannah . . . God, sometimes it felt like Hannah just happened to her. It was like Hannah had a gravitational pull unto herself, drawing Sam in like a bee to honey, her words sweet, the way she made Sam feel even sweeter.

It had been dizzying at first, dating someone who had so much faith in her, more than she had ever had in herself, believing Sam was destined for something greater than the life she'd dreamed of. You're thinking too small, Hannah had told her one night in a pique of frustration that had resulted in the destruction of no fewer than three of Sam's dishes. Good dishes. You could be great, but you're too damn nice. No one is going to fight for you but you, Sam.