If We Were Perfect - Ana Huang Page 0,6

intoxicated to realize the woman he’d arrived with had ditched him while he’d been in the restroom.

When did Olivia start going out with overgrown frat boys who couldn’t keep their drinks down and their shirts on? Why did Sammy care?

I don’t. Sammy stabbed a piece of beef with his fork while Jessica talked about the new case she was working on. Luckily, she didn’t mention Olivia again for the rest of dinner, and their conversation topics stayed in neutral territory.

The first time Sammy introduced Jessica as his girlfriend had been at his Fourth of July barbecue three years ago, and it’d taken a helluva lot of convincing before she agreed to the ruse. Neither she nor his best friend Nardo Crescas—who’d grown up with Jessica and had connected her with Sammy after she moved to California—had approved of him faking a girlfriend to get under Olivia’s skin.

To be fair, such games were childish, but Sammy had been so rattled by being around Olivia again after years of avoiding her that he hadn’t been thinking straight. His bakery had had a pop-up in New York that summer, and he’d temporarily moved to NYC to serve as the face of the new venture. It’d been easy to sidestep Farrah’s efforts to throw him and Olivia together when they lived on opposite sides of the country; it was nearly impossible when they were in the same city. Jessica happened to be in town that weekend for work—yes, work during Fourth of July—and had reluctantly agreed to play the part of his girlfriend.

Not that it mattered. Olivia hadn’t blinked an eye—not then, and not the second time around, when Sammy brought Jessica as his plus one to Farrah and Blake’s wedding. That time, it’d been to ensure he didn’t do anything stupid, as people were wont to do when they were drunk at a wedding and in close proximity with the ex-love of their life.

By the time dinner ended, Sammy had sunk into a brooding silence. If Jessica noticed, she didn’t say anything.

“Thanks for dinner.” Jessica wound her scarf around her neck. Unless there was a heatwave, San Francisco evenings were substantially chillier than its afternoons—a fact that always surprised tourists who came to the Bay Area expecting the same hot, sunny weather as in Southern California. “You really didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to.” Sammy’s phone buzzed with an incoming call. When he saw the name on the screen, his blood iced over.

Olivia.

She hadn’t called him in nearly a decade. It was like he’d conjured her call simply by thinking of her throughout dinner.

Or had she been thinking about him after they ran into each other?

“Who is it?” Jessica asked.

“No one.” The call ended, replaced with a missed call notification. “You want a ride home?”

“Nah, I’m meeting Mara for drinks. You can join us if you’d like.”

“Thanks, but I’m gonna call it a night.” He hugged her. “Congrats again. Don’t forget us little people once you make it big.”

Jessica’s laugh pealed through the night. “Says the Insta-famous baker. What was it Zagat called you? A ‘pastry virtuoso’?”

“Good night,” he said pointedly, earning himself another laugh.

Sammy grinned and waited until Jessica had ducked into a cab before he walked to his car. There, his smile faded, and he stared at his phone, torn.

“Dammit.” He pulled up his recent calls list and dialed Olivia back.

One ring. Two. Three.

He was about to give up when she finally answered, sounding out of breath. “Hey.”

“Hey.” He put her on speaker and connected his phone to the car so he could navigate out of his parking spot, freeing it up for the Prius waiting to take his place. “You called?”

There was a brief pause. “It was nothing.” A faint tinge of embarrassment colored her tone. “I butt-dialed you.”

“You’re a bad liar, Olivia, and you wouldn’t have called me unless it was an emergency.”

Frankly, Sammy was shocked she called even if it were an emergency. He’d expected her to have purged him from her contacts list years ago. The fact she hadn’t made his heart squeeze in a worrying way.

“I’m an excellent liar,” Olivia huffed. His mouth quirked up at her indignation. “Look, it’s been a long day, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. You’re the only person I know in the city besides my coworkers, which is why I called you, but I’ve got it under control.”

Sammy stopped at a red light. Concern twisted through him. “Got what under control?”

She told him, and when he asked for her address, she hesitated