“No!” Babette said. “We’ll all stay here.”

But I shook my head at Babette. “You need to get away.” Then I gestured to all three of them. “And you all need some time together.”

“We’ll just get a room of our own,” Tina said, not meaning it.

But I shook my head. “It’s fully booked,” I said. I had no idea if it was booked or not. But here’s what I did know: Nothing could be better for Babette than a little time with her real family. Nothing could be better for all of them than to make good use of Kent Buckley being halfway around the world. And nothing could possibly be worse for me than a whole weekend with Tina.

I’d rather spend my Christmas all alone watching Hallmark movies.

And that’s exactly what I wound up doing.

* * *

A few days later, I took a car service to pick up Duncan from surgery.

As promised.

It wasn’t a hospital, it was an office building—with Cryosurgery Associates taking up the entire third floor.

I wasn’t even entirely sure what cryosurgery was.

They were rolling Duncan out of recovery in a wheelchair just as I arrived.

Are you wondering if he’d worn his suit and tie to have surgery?

Because that’s a yes. Though the jacket and vest were off now, and lying across his lap, the shirt was open at the collar and untucked, and he was wearing the tie outside his collar, lying there loose—as if he’d just slipped it back over his head like a lei. There it was. He looked good neat and pressed, but he also looked good mussed up.

He squinted when he saw me. “Are you who I think you are?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“The librarian with the clown socks.”

“That’s me. You asked me to pick you up.”

“I did?” He turned to the nurse behind him for confirmation. She nodded. “That was smart of me,” he said.

Wow. What had they dosed him up with?

The nurse gave me a stack of discharge instructions and a small batch of “hard-core” painkillers, saying he could switch to Tylenol tomorrow, but to definitely stick to the hard stuff through the night.

“My name’s Lisa,” the nurse said next, circling her name on the discharge instructions, “and you can call me with any questions.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “I’m Sam.”

“Oh,” she said then, turning to take in the sight of me. “You’re Sam!” Then she just smiled.

“What?” I asked.

“He was telling us all about you.”

I frowned.

She smiled again and nodded. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Good things.”

“Like?” I prompted.

“Oh … I feel like you must already know.”

“I definitely do not.”

“And if you don’t know,” she went on, “then he should be the one to tell you, not me.”

Well, that was unsatisfying.

Lisa helped me wheel Duncan out to the parking lot, where the driver was waiting. “He sang about you, too,” she said as we walked. “In recovery.”

“He sang about me?”

“You know,” she said. “The ‘Oh! Susanna’ song—but adjusted for ‘Samantha.’”

“Do a lot of people sing in recovery?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Never. No one. He’s adorable. How long have you two been”—she gestured between us with her hand—“ya know?”

“Oh!” I said. “No. We’re not … we’re just work colleagues.”

She laughed like I was joking. Then she stopped walking when she realized I wasn’t. “Wait—you’re not even dating?”

I shook my head. “Not even close.”

She opened her eyes wide, like Whoa. “He has got a thing for you, lady.”

I shook my head. “He doesn’t even like me. Like, at all.”

“I’m telling you,” she said, “he does.” Then she added, “The opiates never lie.”

At the car door, Lisa flipped up the footrests on the chair so Duncan could set his feet on the pavement. Before we hoisted him up, she said to be careful of his left side—hip to ribs. He was harder to lift than I was expecting—so much dead weight. I wedged myself up under his armpit and clamped his arm over me as I rotated him.

He was bigger than I’d realized.

I maneuvered him into the backseat with a plop, and he was so out of it, I had to lift his feet up for him, and lean across him to buckle him. He kept his eyes open the whole time, watching me without helping—like his brain was in slow motion and couldn’t catch up.

“You smell like honeysuckle,” he said, while I was clicking the buckle.

“That’s my shampoo,” I said, and just as I pulled away, he leaned in closer to take a deeper sniff—and his face collided with the back of my head.

“Oh, God,” I said, leaning closer to see if he was hurt. “I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

He just smiled up at me. “I’m fine.”

Do you know what love-struck looks like? It’s so hard to describe—something about the eyes, just open and admiring and maybe even a little bit wonder-filled, like they’re drinking in the sight of you. That’s the only word I can come up with for his expression.

Safe to say, it was not a look I got very often—especially not from him.

He looked down at my blouse. “I knew you’d be wearing polka dots.”

Lisa watched me as I closed the car door. “He’ll sleep a lot today, but he should be pretty normal tomorrow,” she said. “And the painkillers cause nausea for most people, so he won’t want to eat, but he needs to do it, anyway. Especially before the next round of pills.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

“He should sleep in a loose T-shirt tonight—or shirtless if the skin is irritated,” she said. “It’s all in the instructions. And you might want to put him in some sweatpants when you get him home,” the nurse said. “He was supposed to arrive in something comfortable, but he showed up in a suit.”

“He really loves suits,” I said.

“They really love him,” she said, giving me a wink.

“Noted,” I said, with a nod.

She snagged one last glimpse of him through the car window and shook her head. “Adorable.”

* * *

On the drive home—I swear, this is true—as I sat beside him in the backseat of the car, Duncan held his empty hand as if there was a phone in it, peering at it and saying, “I’m sorry. I think we’re lost. My phone’s not working.”

I didn’t even know how to begin to correct him, so I just said, “Don’t worry. I know the way.”

He shook his head. “But you’ve never been to my place.”

“But our driver has the address.”

Duncan frowned and blinked. “We have a driver?”

I pointed up at the guy in the front seat. Then I said, “They really doped you up, huh?”

“Yes,” Duncan said. “It was nice of them. They know I don’t like … surgeries.”

“Does anybody like surgeries?” I asked.

“Probably not,” Duncan said. “But I don’t like them the most.”

He tried to check his phone again.

He didn’t seem drunk, exactly. He wasn’t slurring his words. He just seemed really, really relaxed. And, also, like the world he saw through his eyes and the actual world were not exactly the same thing.

Next, partly to distract him, but mostly because Lisa had made me curious, I said, “The nurse said you were talking about me.”

He gave a big nod. “Yes. Yes, I was. I told them about the day we met.”

Oh. “That,” I said, “was not my best day.”

“Are you kidding me?” Duncan said, squinting over at me to see if I was serious. “I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Like, ever.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning. “Really? ’Cause—”

“Oh, yeah. I’m talking, ever. And that’s really saying a lot because—I don’t know if you’ve noticed but this whole entire planet is just crawling with girls.”

I shrugged. “Well, we are fifty-one percent of the—”

“They’re everywhere! You can’t even get a donut without running into at least one! Sometimes five or ten. That’s what I’m saying. In my whole life of being constantly bombarded by girls … you”—he pointed at me—“are the prettiest one I ever saw.”

This had to be the drugs talking. I was absolutely nothing special. Not a head turner or a showstopper. Just a perfectly ordinary human.

But what else was there to do but play along?

“Okay,” I said. “I did not get that vibe.”

Duncan nodded. “Yeah. Well, you’ve gotta hide it, right? You can’t just drool all over people. I remember it exactly. It was your first day.”

“It was your first day,” I corrected.

“Nope. You were wearing … I don’t know. All gray. And your hair was different then.” He looked up at my pink bangs. Then he reached out and patted them. “No pink.”

Wait—what?

“And remember we had those cubbies in the faculty lounge, but yours was jammed—and I walked in to find you just beating the shit out of it.” There was admiration in his voice. “And then I came in and showed you the exact place to smack it, and it popped right open like Fonzie.”

He was talking about Andrews. He was talking about four years ago. He was talking about the old me. The mousy me. The forgettable me.