The revenue would stop streaming in without those accounts, and it would be hard to find brands with the budget for her since the biggest players were included in her non-compete agreement. Sloane’s savings would go fast. She’d have to find a cheaper apartment, to start substitute teaching in some grimy public school or something.
Marian Cooper slipped her hand into Sloane’s and squeezed with a compassion that almost brought tears to her eyes. “He won’t be here tonight. Graham asked him not to come.”
Sloane didn’t have the chance to respond because the server arrived at that moment with a tray full of steaming ceramic crocks.
“What is this?” She asked the waiter, not quite believing what she saw. She scanned the crowd for Cooper.
“Last minute menu addition. Aaron’s Favorite Soup. Enjoy.” And he whisked away with the empty tray.
There was Cooper behind him, studying Sloane’s reaction. Giving her a sort of hopeful half smile. The sight of him filled Sloane’s hands with rogue energy. She tugged her hand free from Marian’s grip and somehow upended the soup in front of her. Sloane shot up to avoid a lapful of chicken broth, shaking the hot excess from her hand.
You do this thing when you’re nervous, she could hear him saying.
“Sloane, are you all right?”
No, she wasn’t. But she couldn’t answer the older woman. The air caught in her throat like it was squeezed in a vise, and she escaped to the restroom.
She scrubbed her hands. If only she could scrub her mind clean of everything that had happened over the past few days.
This was Aaron’s soup, and Cooper had added it to the menu for her after everything. To surprise her? Torment her? Try to make some kind of amends?
What was she supposed to do with that?
Sloane jumped as the door creaked open behind her.
“No,” she shouted at Cooper, scrubbing harder. “Why does it always have to be you?”
He ignored her and crossed the distance between them in two long strides. “Sloane, you need to stop. Your hands are bleeding.”
She hunched her shoulders and pushed back against him as he tried to reach around her. But her efforts were no match for Cooper’s strong grip.
His hands closed around hers under the scalding water. She turned to face him, twisting and pulling with all of her strength to wrench her wrist free.
“Sloane,” he whispered into her hair. “Stop. Fighting.”
At the unexpected calm in his voice, her breath caught in her throat. She angled her gaze to his, ignoring the warning voice inside that told her to run.
But when she heard the door open then the surprised apology of an unsuspecting diner, she used the chance to escape, out of the restroom, through the kitchen door, around the workers preparing food and washing dishes, past the office where Cooper had created a space for her.
In the alley behind the restaurant the night air wrapped around Sloane, thick with coming rain and remnant cigarette smoke. She barely had time to crouch against the brick before the door opened behind her. There was no doubt in her mind who had followed her.
And one look into his eyes, one glimpse of the tenderness he regarded her with undid the tension in her muscles. It wrecked her. She sunk into his chest and felt his hands at the small of her back. White-hot tears stung while the iron grip of pain around her middle slackened a notch. “You should have left me alone.”
Cooper sighed. “You think I don’t know that?”
He was doing it again. Blaming himself. Carrying the weight of something that wasn’t his fault. Is that what he thought she was doing with Aaron?
“Is that what you really want? To be alone?”
She tilted her head and searched his eyes. “I...”
Her pulse quickened as his gaze flickered between her eyes and her lips.
“I don’t...”
She wished she could hate him. It would make being alone easier if she did.
He drifted closer to her.
“You...”
She had every reason to hate him. For being the one who’d shattered the illusion that she was okay with just getting by.
But she didn’t want to be without him.
Sloane covered his lips with her own, weaving her fingers through his thick curls. So urgent for his nearness that she couldn’t get close enough to him until his back thudded against the brick wall of the restaurant. Nowhere left to go.
He eased away from her, forehead creasing. But she threw her arms around him, her lips covering the question she knew he was going to ask.
No thinking. For one moment, there would be no overthinking.
Cooper’s lips parted, stealing her breath away. All-in and intoxicating now that he had her permission.
Forget about the court documents. Forget about the muddy footprints he had tracked all over her immaculate life. There was nothing in the world except for this man. This kiss.
Sloane’s lungs finally felt ready to burst. She pushed away from him, gasping for air. “I know...that we are better with each other. But I don’t think... I just can’t—”
“You can, though. That’s the thing. You were doing it, Sloane.”
She looked at him. At the brown eyes that seemed to see right through her and never let her off easily. She dropped her gaze, then saw his black dress shirt soiled with her tears.
On this, the most important night of his life, he was in the alley dealing with her instead of enjoying the fruit of all his hard work.
This was the impact she had on him. What she did to his life—made him mix up his priorities.
“I—I have to go.” She had to release him so he could be with his diners, in his restaurant—the one he’d fought for. The one he deserved.
She retraced her steps through the kitchen, keeping her face averted, then grabbed her purse and camera bag. Without a word to anyone she stepped out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk.
“Sloane.”
She tensed at the sound of Cooper’s voice.
Why couldn’t he just let her go? She turned, waiting for him to say something. But he didn’t need to. The message was written all over his face.
“I know,” she breathed. Sloane knew he wanted to be the one who was worth it. The one she allowed to see everything and love her anyway.
Her heart was resigned to Graham Cooper Jr. She had no choice in the matter. And yet, her brain commanded she turn her back on him.
She wasn’t ready yet. And she couldn’t give him hope if she might never be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
TWO DAYS HAD passed since Sloane had left her apartment. Two days to sleep, pray, cook, sanitize and mourn. Two days to search for new jobs and new futures she couldn’t get excited about.
Two days of keeping track of the Simone food truck’s wild popularity, wondering who was working it. Half wishing it was her who smelled like butter and batter.
Two days of missing him so much she could barely breathe at times.
But as she’d dined on a late dinner of noodles delivered from the pho place on the corner, she promised herself one more night of wallowing. Then it would be time to get on with her life.
So today after her morning oatmeal, she dressed for a run.
Sloane was locking her apartment when she heard a familiar tinkling of jewelry and keys behind her.
“Good. You’re dressed.”
She turned to face Mrs. Melone, who was clothed in black Lululemon from head to toe, a bright headband holding her silver hairstyle in place.
“Hi, Mrs. Melone. I was just—”
“I don’t care. Whatever you were about to do doesn’t matter anymore because you’re coming with me.”
Sloane looked at Mrs. Melone sideways.
“I’
m not going to let you waste away in that apartment in the fetal position like some emo hipster—or whatever you kids call it these days. Mick says it’s been two days since you’ve come out.”
Sloane felt her jaw unhinge. Of course her gossipy neighbor had talked to their doorman.
“Okay, Mrs. Melone.” Sloane blew out a breath and pasted on a smile. She’d promised herself life would resume today. Why not begin with an adventure? “Where are we going?”
“Where does it look like we’re going? Yoga.”
New resolve or not, she definitely wasn’t in any position to get her namaste on.
“Don’t give me that look. It’s not a hippy kind of class.”
Sloane opened her mouth to say something, but the knowledge that she lived in a world where trendy, Old-Hollywood Mrs. Melone would take such a class still dumbfounded her for some reason.
Nevertheless, twenty minutes later, she was sitting on a bright blue yoga mat—which she’d personally watched the studio employee clean—surrounded by blond wood and bamboo and walls made of mirrors.
“You’ll love the instructor of this class,” Mrs. Melone said as she arranged a stack of bright-hued foam blocks next to her mat.
Before Sloane could respond, the door opened, and a short, fiftyish woman walked to the center of the room. She was trim and toned with smooth, clear skin and a dazzling smile that changed the entire energy of the room.
Sloane gritted her teeth. People like that always made her uncomfortable in her own skin. But there wasn’t anything wrong with them. Nope. That was all on her.
“Welcome to Living Well Yoga. I’m Jana.” She spoke with a heavy accent—Eastern European, perhaps—as she unrolled her mat. “You ready to get practice on? Ready to get centered, yes?”
A hum of voices answered her. Out of the corner of her eye, Sloane noticed a man diagonal in the row behind her. Judging by the way he was slightly angled toward the girl next to him, they were probably together.
Cooper would never be caught dead in a yoga class, even if she begged.
Don’t think about him. She swallowed a lump in her throat. Thinking about Cooper wouldn’t help her be centered.
“Now, any new people here today?”
Sloane kept her hands tightly tucked under her thighs.
“We begin our practice with breathing to really get the blood warm.”
The class mirrored Jana as she straightened and faced the front of the room, narrating her actions as she guided them through breathing and light stretching and then transitioned into balancing poses. Sloane covertly watched what Mrs. Melone did before making any movements.
“You look like Mr. Roboto,” her neighbor whispered. “You have to relax and own what you’re doing or it defeats the whole purpose.”
Sloane nodded and allowed her muscles to deflate with her lungs. It actually felt sort of good, a slow, stretching burn that also somehow relaxed her.
By the end of the standing series, as Jana called it, Sloane’s legs were shaking under her with every deep, balancing stretch. She had a strong lower body from all the running she did, but this class only illuminated her need to add some hip and leg flexibility work into her daily routine.
Routine.
The reminder pulled in Sloane’s chest, casting a gray shadow over her as she lowered to the mat. She didn’t have a routine anymore. Everything in her life had changed.
Numbness spread throughout her body as she stretched her legs to the front of her mat. She fought tight hamstrings to reach her toes, but her fingers didn’t even get close to them. And all she could focus on was the ugly, jagged scar that marred her left lower leg. Purplish and raised and hideous against her pale skin.
It was always going to be there. As long as that leg was a part of her, she’d have the reminder of how she’d gotten that scar. And her emotional wounds were no better, held together with such fragile stitching that she’d been tiptoeing not to rip them open.
Now there was a new dimension to it all that took her pain from dull ache to fresh and stinging. How could she have let this happen?
The strength she felt with the memory of Cooper’s smile, the phantom twinge of his presence next to her was the only answer she needed. He’d been good for her. Sure, she’d have been safe in her predictable routine if she’d never met him. But she’d also be a wreck right now—more of a wreck, anyway.
“Now we move to our final meditation.” Jana’s heavy accent brought Sloane to the present.
She followed the instructions and lay on her back.
“We are going to take deep breath, and when you exhale, you are going to no longer be anything in your past. You are new slate. Ready? Inhale.”
Sloane took a deep breath.
“And exhale.”
She pictured herself at the edge of a mountain. And as the steady stream of air passed through her lips, images flashed through her mind and rolled off the cliff.
“Slow and steady.”
The car accident. The memory of her hospital room. Her mom’s face crumpled in grief.
“One breath at a time.”
The seething expression Graham Cooper Sr. gave her in the restaurant. The court documents in an accusing row on her computer screen. Down the cliff.
“Yoga is an amazing thing.” Jana’s voice was serene. “We bend and we stretch and we feel discomfort. But it sends blood, oxygen, life to your body to heal. Make stronger.”
Sloane felt a tear slide into her hairline as the words sank in, leaving a tingly sensation with their truths. And she allowed her mind to conjure the image of Cooper—everything he’d been to her, all lined up in a row.
Disruptor of her perfect, controlled world.
The first to break through her armor.
The one who’d convinced her how strong she was, how happy she could be.
“Just like the pain you have lived, the imperfections make something new. Something beautiful.”
A version of Cooper’s own words. And something snapped together inside Sloane.
What if she’d been the one to lose her life in the accident? What if Aaron had traded the vibrant goof of a person he was for this...half life? The idea raised goose bumps across her arms.
If Aaron knew what she’d become since his death, that she’d let part of herself die with him, he’d be furious. He’d do that thing where he puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. He’d have no words for her. She knew because she’d have done the same if he missed out on even a second of happiness because of her.
If he had the opportunity for love and didn’t reach out and knock everything out of the way to snatch it up.
A strange, distantly familiar sensation washed over Sloane at that mental image. The tingling in her limbs rose to a rolling boil that consumed her entire body and bubbled out of her mouth in chest-heaving, shoulder-shaking, uncontrollable laughter. And the only possible solution was to let it happen.
Awkward glances from her classmates notwithstanding, she was free to breathe. Even though she didn’t quite know how, she was ready to start stirring the waters of her grief instead of leaving them stagnant.
The laughter subsided, leaving an almost absurd realization in its wake. There, surrounded by ten or so strangers, she’d zeroed in on the one thing standing in her way. Everyone who mattered had forgiven her. But Sloane had finally forgiven herself. Cooper had been right.
For years, she’d been convinced that it should have been her who died, but now she decided she wanted to live.
CHAPTER THIRTY
IT WAS ONE of his weaknesses, Cooper knew, but he couldn’t be certain the restaurant had done well its first week until he saw the report himself.
“Thanks for everything,” he told Janet as he walked her out, the revelatory stack of papers tucked under his
arm.
“We did good.” Janet awarded him a rare smile as she ducked into her car. “And, yes, I ran the numbers twice.”
Cooper made a face, grinning as he shut her car door, watched as she drove away and then hurried into the restaurant, locking the door behind him.
He settled into his favorite leather chair in front of the fireplace and scanned the first page. The numbers looked...better than good. Between the food truck and the café, they’d done remarkably well.
His employees had celebrated the end of their first week with a sparkling cider toast, but the only person he wanted to share the good news with wasn’t here. Months before, he’d scheduled opening week as paid time off from J. Marian Restaurants, so he worked in the kitchen to keep himself relaxed and occupied. But there were reminders of Sloane everywhere, her squeaky-clean fingerprints all over the place.
His wrist rotated involuntarily as if craving to swirl a glass in his hand. He pictured the amber glow of scotch lit by a fireplace. But Sloane’s voice overrode his imagination.
You’re not that guy anymore. You’re just a recovering person who had a bad day.
Some days he might fail, but today wasn’t going to be one of them.
Cooper’s thoughts were interrupted by a pounding on the front door. Who on earth was trying to get in almost two hours past closing when this area of downtown was shutting down for the night? As he approached the entrance, he recognized the silhouette of the person peering into the café. What his father wanted at an hour like this—or what condition he’d be in—Cooper didn’t know, but it couldn’t be good.
He unlocked the door, and a gust of icy wind wrapped around him. He backed away and crossed his arms as his father took his time unwinding his scarf and unfastening the toggles on his coat. Taking an inventory of the space, uncharacteristically rumpled as if searching the walls for the pieces of an explanation.
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