Sameera excused herself to wash her hands before they set off. She needed a moment alone to collect her thoughts. She wasn’t a confrontational person by nature, but she wouldn’t let anyone attack her friends. She paused, thinking. Were they friends? At the very least, she and Tom were in this thing together. Even though they both had something to gain from their arrangement, he was her partner in crime, and Sameera had always been loyal. Despite the people she was loyal to not always deserving it, she thought, thinking of Hunter. Somehow, she knew Tom was different.
In the bathroom, she stared at her reflection and fixed her hair. The cold brought a rosy blush to her cheeks and a brightness to her eyes. In Atlanta, she spent so much time indoors, her light-brown skin usually looked dull by this time of the year. Her dark-brown hair was in its usual style, but she pulled off the elastic and fluffed it around her shoulders, then fished a tinted lip gloss from her bag. After a minute, she wiped off the gloss and retied her hair. Impressing people wasn’t why she was here. She was here to meet Andy Shaikh, save her job, and maybe talk with her parents—in that order. Everything else was a distraction.
When she returned to the wood lot, everyone else had left, but Jan stood uncomfortably close to Tom, her finger poking into his chest. Sameera didn’t feel bad about eavesdropping, because the older woman hadn’t tried to lower her voice.
“You broke my girl’s heart, and now you’re back to rub it in her face. I won’t stand for it.”
Tom gently pushed Jan’s hand away. “Emily doesn’t want me anymore, Jan. I wish things had ended differently, but we’ve both moved on, and we’re both happy. You have to find some way to accept that. It’s the only way forward with your daughter.”
The older woman took a step back, shaking her head. “All you do is take, Tom Cooke. Your entire family is the same.”
Sameera cleared her throat loudly, startling them both. She pointedly asked Tom if he was ready to go and pulled him toward the door without waiting for an answer.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Jan called after them.
Sameera turned around, hoping this wouldn’t turn into another scene. But Jan was pointing at a Christmas tree, neatly tied and ready for transport. “Your parents said they wanted a souvenir. Hope you paid for extra luggage on your flight back home, Atlanta girl.”
Chapter Twelve
“Hold your end straight. Now it’s too high; lower it a bit. No, wait, watch where you’re going!” Sameera said. Faced with the enormous tree, she and Tom had decided to carry it to the truck themselves. Not that they had a choice, as Jan was clearly not about to offer any help. Though Tom insisted he could carry it himself, Sameera had insisted right back that she would help. The neatly wrapped conifer was her parents’ souvenir, after all. What Tahsin and Naveed had been thinking, she had no idea. There was no way they could bring a tree back to Atlanta.
“How do you usually decorate your Christmas tree?” Sameera asked.
“In Atlanta, it’s just me, so I don’t bother. What about your family?”
She thought fast. “With whatever we have lying around. Stickers. Paint. Streamers. Potato chips?”
“Not cheese balls? What about doughnuts on a string? Maybe some of those Ringolos, or Bugles,” Tom teased.
“Doritos are good, too,” she agreed.
“So, you’ve never decorated a Christmas tree,” Tom said.
“What gave me away?”
The grin he threw her was warm and genuine. As if he saw her silliness, and liked her all the better for it.
Hunter’s voice floated in her head then, always inconvenient and never welcome.Really, Sameera, why would you say such a ridiculous thing? Sometimes I wonder where your head is at.
Her despicable ex had routinely made little demeaning comments whenever she’d said something silly. She sometimes wondered if Hunter had recognized something broken in her that he could burrow inside—or had he done the breaking, so that she would never be open to love again?
“About Jan . . .” Sameera started.
“I’m sorry for what she said back there. She’s known me since I was a little kid, which means she doesn’t hold back. I haven’t been her favorite person for the past few years.”
“Because you broke up with Emily?” Sameera asked, hating herself. At least she hadn’t added,your drop-dead-gorgeous ex-girlfriend/fiancée/wife.
“Something like that,” Tom said, evasive. “Also, because I left town and made it clear I didn’t intend to move back. That’s considered treason in some Wolf Run households, including my own.”
Sameera tilted her head, thinking. “It’s a small town. I get why you might have wanted to explore the world a bit more.”
Tom stopped abruptly. “I loved living here when I was a kid. It felt like the town belonged to me. My dad certainly talked about Wolf Run as if it did. I felt special. Except as I got older, it started to feel wrong. Like I had been given something I never earned. Then my mom got sick. For a long time after she died, it was hard to reconcile the part of me that belonged in Wolf Run and the part that wanted to leave, that needed to leave. When I got accepted to Georgia Tech, I took it. Rob didn’t even know I had applied.”
Sameera gripped the end of her tree tightly—it was tempting to drop it and embrace Tom instead. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, and a flash of gratitude passed over his face, but then he shrugged.
“When I told my dad I was moving away, he predicted I would never come back,” he said.
Sameera made a big show of looking around. “You’re here now. It’s never too late to come home.” After Hunter left, Nadiya had encouraged Sameera to get back in touch with her parents. It had taken a long timefor her to work up her courage, to swallow her fear and pride, and agree to talk. She was grateful every day that she had, and that her parents had welcomed her back in their lives.
