One & Only

Chapter Five

FIVE

“Honestly, Tess, I always thought your little plan of never running into him was kind of naive,” Sylvia said, tying the black apron with the embroidered green leaf on it around her waist. “Canton’s not that big of a school.”

“We weren’t even supposed to be in the same department,” I argued. It was my first day of training at Verde, and Sylvia was running me through the basics before the lunch shift started.

She rolled her big brown eyes at me as she swept her hair off her neck and secured it with some carved leather clasp that looked like it came right from the prop department of Game of Thrones. Which, considering Sylvia, it probably had. “It’s not like he was an Art History major or anything. You both study Life Sciences. You both study algae, for Pete’s sake.”

I shook my head and looked away. “Whatever. It’s fine. He’s not even mad. He told me all about how he got over me…”

Annabel Warren, Sylvia’s sister, paused as she passed us and set down her carafes of coffee on the stainless steel counter. “I’m sorry. Back that up a minute. He told you how he got over you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He said he was upset for a week and then he slept with lots of girls and then he was fine.”

Annabel threw back her head and gave a big, throaty laugh. “Oh yeah, he’s not mad at all. He just felt he had to point out his significant sexual prowess five seconds into seeing you for the first time in two years.”

That gave me pause. I pursed my lips, which made Annabel start laughing all over again. The sisters were a few years apart, and they both had the same peaches-and-cream skin and dark-red hair, but that was where their resemblance ended. Sylvia was tall and willowy, and when she wasn’t working at Verde, she was singing in a variety of local nightclubs, coffee shops, and Renaissance faires. Annabel, several inches shorter to start with, had never lost the weight she’d gained after getting pregnant at sixteen. Her son, Milo, was seven now, and Annabel was juggling his care, two jobs, and the occasional night school class to try to get a degree in nursing.

“Tell her what happened the next time you saw him,” Sylvia singsonged as she filled ramekins with chopped chives.

“He gave me some pointers on my class schedule,” I said. She had me slicing lemons. I hated slicing anything. There was a reason I’d gotten into algae, not higher life forms.

“After that,” she prompted, blowing a tendril of hair out of her eyes.

I sighed. “We walked to the parking lot, and his girlfriend was there to pick him up.”

“His rich, blonde, beautiful girlfriend,” Sylvia added. She looked at her sister. “I mean, if I were friends with this Dylan guy instead of you, I’d be congratulating him on how well his revenge scenario was working out. The only thing that could possibly have made it all better for him is if instead of you being a gorgeous, brilliant transfer student with a fat academic scholarship, you’d become some dirty old bag lady.”

“Thanks for the gorgeous and brilliant part, at least,” I said.

“No problem, honey.” She went back to filling ramekins, and Annabel trotted off with her coffee jugs.

What neither of the Warren girls knew was that Hannah Swift wasn’t just a hot blonde girlfriend for Dylan to show off to me. She was my secret sister as well. It was funny. I’d often thought of Hannah—or at least, of the existence of Hannah, since I’d never met her before—when I was hanging out with Sylvia and Annabel. They lived together, with Milo, in a little two-bedroom apartment in a building not far from my mom’s. They’d both had some awful crap to wade through, especially after their parents had kicked Annabel out of the house for getting pregnant and her creepy babydaddy had left her in the lurch…but they had each other.