Jolene frowned at me. “I will not track Lindy down and kill her for you. I mean, I know how to hide a body, but I’ve got kids now.”

“No!” I exclaimed. “I mean a job at the restaurant. Would you like to manage it for me?”

“Well, I already work part-time for Beeline, and I work some days at my uncle’s shop.”

“Exactly. You know how a restaurant works, and you know the people here much better than I do. If you see me doing something stupid, you’ll tell me, loudly.”

“Would you actually listen to me?” she asked dryly.

“At least half the time,” I promised. “Come on, how would you feel about dropping the part-time jobs and working for me? I can offer you a pitiful salary and all of the free food you can eat.”

“You may want to rethink that!” Zeb called from the back of the house.

“I don’t think my uncles would like me working for the competition.”

“That’s just it. I don’t plan on competing with your uncles’ place. They do beautiful sandwiches and deli selections, mostly lunch and breakfast. I’m aiming more for comfort foods, slightly upscale, but not so much that you wouldn’t be comfortable there in jeans. A lunch and dinner crowd.”

“I’d still want to check with them first. And my dad.”

I raised an eyebrow.

She nodded. “We’re a close family.”

I muttered, “Must be a Southern thing.”

—

Jolene helped me get the apartment above Southern Comforts into a somewhat livable condition over the next few days, cleaning and making small repairs. After retrieving my stuff from Sam’s house, Jane and Andrea showed up with an enormous care package stocked with housewarming gifts such as a new shower curtain, cleaning supplies, and a great big bottle of vodka. I loved Jane and Andrea. I really did.

Sam called, but I didn’t pick up the phone. His messages were increasingly apologetic, which just made me feel worse for hurting him. He was sorry I woke up to his conversation with Lindy, he said. He didn’t know what I’d heard, but he wished I would talk to him so we could work this out. One message had him sounding so worried, so lonely, that I nearly hit “end” so I could dial Sam’s number, but then he said, “I thought we were friends.” And that kept me from checking my messages for the next two days.

By day three, the words “just a friend” kept running through my head on a loop, making me cringe and cry and occasionally throw a pot at a wall.

I was really going to have to stop doing that.

On October 28, the day Sam was supposed to reclaim his house, I sat in my new restaurant with a perfectly nice lager resting on the bar in front of me. Jolene had finally agreed to take the job at Southern Comforts. But her uncles had warned me that if they caught me duplicating from their menu, I would be in for an old-fashioned ass-whupping. But I hadn’t had any luck finding a contractor to do the repairs I needed. I was having trouble narrowing down which human and vampire menus I wanted to use for the restaurant. I couldn’t even decide on a color scheme for the menu.

For the first time in my life, I truly had no clue what to do. Even when I had my meltdown, I’d had a plan—visit Chef Gamling, get my life back in order. But now, even though I knew what I was doing in the long term, I was completely paralyzed by indecision over what to do in the next few days, in the next few hours.

I toyed with the cap from a Faux Type O bottle. There were so many things I could do with this place, but I wasn’t sure of any of them now. Did I really want to save the tabletops as wall displays? Could I refinish the bar to its original oaken glory? How much additional storage space could I allow myself in the kitchen? I wanted Sam’s input in these decisions, his sensible contractor’s brain. But it seemed that John Lassiter’s curse had killed my pseudo-relationship before it even got off the ground, taking my construction plans down with it.

I took a deep breath and a deeper draw from my beer. This stopped now. The time for useless pouting and self-flagellating was done. I was a homeowner, sort of. I owned my own restaurant. I had friends, real friends who liked me, despite my basket-case tendencies. I’d managed a semifunctional relationship for a few days, which was a personal record. My life was so much better than it was when I’d rolled into town.

The first order of business was turning off this playlist, because Adele’s gorgeous emo postbreakup music was killing me.

I scrolled through the lists on my iPod until I found some Lynyrd Skynyrd and filled my kitchen with the sounds of “Sweet Home Alabama.” I pulled out a notebook and pen and began painstakingly writing text and printing instructions for the menu of my new restaurant.

Coda

10

Jolene, put the green down, and step away from the wall.”

“But it’s so cheerful!” Jolene protested, holding up the paint can labeled “New Leaf.”

“It’s neon!”

“It is rather, er, bright,” Chef Gamling told her gently.

Jolene chucked a fork at my head. “It is not!”

“Yipe!” I cried, ducking out of the way. “Hey, you left the kids at home to limit the number of items thrown at my head tonight. And giving me a fork-related head contusion will not change the fact that our color scheme is white and blue.”

“Actually, we left the kids at home because we’re spending the evening in a construction zone,” Zeb said. “A construction zone with a bar in it.”

“Just give the green a chance!” Jolene begged.

”Are you going to be this stubborn about everything?” I groaned.

I shot a pleading look at Zeb, Jane, Gabriel, Dick, and Andrea, who were sitting at the bar, watching the exchange gleefully. Apparently, whatever instinct they may have had to protect the “new girl” in the group had evaporated over Halloween, when I beat Jane at quarters while dressed as Wonder Woman. Vampires seemed to take drinking games very seriously.

My eyes narrowed. “Oh, you guys are no help whatsoever.”

“Just be glad it’s not peach,” Gabriel said.

Jane cackled when she saw my confused expression. “Someday, I’ll show you pictures of the bridesmaids’ dresses from Jolene and Zeb’s wedding.”

“I didn’t even pick out that color!” Jolene retorted. “That’s not fair.”

“I’m just here for the free eats,” Dick said, raising a shot glass full of the Blood Creek Barbecue Sauce. Although Faux Type O technically owned the recipe, the company was so impressed with my plan to open a vampire-friendly restaurant that they’d let me keep the rights to serving it. We were calling the special menu Southern Comforts Blood Shots, to prevent confusions with the liquor menu or the human menu. My resident vampire friends were helping me tweak the recipes with another taste-testing.

Chef Gamling, who had agreed to work part-time in my kitchen when the restaurant opened, was leading them through the “appropriate tasting process” and recording their comments.

Since he didn’t drink blood, Zeb was content to sample the various pie concoctions we’d come up with—caramel apple, peppermint cream with a crushed Oreo crust, and a mixed fruit involving strawberries, cranberries, and raspberries. And, of course, he enjoyed my attempts to control his wife’s horrendous decorating skills. Is there a color-sense equivalent to being tone-deaf?

With the endless details I was juggling, I worried that I would be too busy to maintain my newfound connections with the group. But they simply wouldn’t let me quietly fade into my work as I had in Chicago. Jolene was with me at every step of setting up shop, whether I wanted her opinions or not. Dick had offered to help me find dishes and equipment through his “connections,” while Gabriel stood behind him and shook his dark head vehemently. Jane had offered her advice on starting a small business in the Hollow, the chief of which was to avoid the local Chamber of Commerce like the plague. Andrea’s help had been invaluable while I waded through the complicated licensing process for blending and serving human donor blood. I supposed it shouldn’t be easy to serve human blood to an unsuspecting public, but the red tape was a serious pain in the ass.

“Isn’t it premature to start picking paint colors when you have so much structural work to do around here?” Gabriel asked, a concerned expression wrinkling his brow.

“Why don’t you just ask Sam to help you?” Jane asked.

“You know why,” I shot back, making her raise her hands defensively.

“I tried to help Tess find a contractor,” Dick protested. While the girls tried to nurse me through my confused post-Sam feelings with ice cream and Jane Austen movies, Dick’s method was taking me to The Cellar and getting me hammered. Which made Dick my new favorite guy ever.

I shot my new drinking buddy the stink-eye. “Dick, it only took me two ‘laying pipe’ innuendos from your handsy plumbing guy to decide that I will only use contractors I find through the Yellow Pages.”

“Hey!” Dick exclaimed. “That wasn’t my guy, that was a cousin of my guy. Doesn’t count! And didn’t he come back to apologize?”

“Yes, black and blue, he came back to apologize, which meant I ended up feeling guilty because you beat the tar out of him.”

“Gabriel helped!” Dick protested. “If I knew he would go in for a boob grab in lieu of a handshake, I never would have recommended him. The beatin’ was deserved.”

Dick turned as the battered cowbell above the door jangled and Sam stepped through.

Well, I could at least take comfort in the fact that he looked as bad as I felt. The last two weeks of radio silence had not been kind to Sam Clemson. He looked as if Dick and Gabriel had gotten a piece of him, too—dark bruiselike circles under his eyes, paler-than-usual cheeks, and thin, pinched lips. Something seemed lodged in my throat, a weighty lump that kept me from breathing or swallowing.

Seeing him, all wretched and drawn, made me feel a bit ridiculous for being so angry with him. He hadn’t hurt me intentionally. The f-word he’d used wasn’t an insult. And he wasn’t the first guy to have lingering feelings for his ex-wife. Don’t get me wrong. The fact that I seemed to feel more for him than he felt for me still hurt. But I didn’t feel the urge to damage him or my drywall, which felt like progress.