Lessons in Laughing Out Loud by Rowan Coleman Page B

everything all right.”
Chloe turned to look at Willow. “Do you know, I don’t remember her at all? Isn’t that so sad? I see little kids, with their mums and see all the love and fun they have, and I don’t remember it. Not one thing.”
“You do, somewhere you do. That love your mum gave you then is part of who you are now.”
Instinctively Willow’s hand hovered over Chloe’s long dark brown hair, the hair she’d inherited—along with the black eyes and elfin chin—from her mother, whose photograph had always hung in the living room over the fireplace in Sam’s apartment. Willow would sometimes stand in front of the photo of the laughing, sparkling-eyed, dark-haired woman and think that it would be difficult to find someone as different from Sam’s first wife as she had been. Often she’d wonder if that’s why he picked her, because he needed someone, but not someone who’d remind him in any way of the woman he’d lost at thirty-three. Willow had no idea how to respond to Chloe’s pain; when she looked at the girl it felt like she had emotional dyslexia. She could see the pain in her face, but she couldn’t make sense of it. She couldn’t let herself feel it.
“How about a hot chocolate?” she offered lamely, in lieu of anything better.
“Yeah, okay.” Chloe’s reply was hoarse. She held out a hand, and Willow pulled her up into a sitting position and handed her the remote control for the TV.
Grateful for an excuse to leave the room for a moment and get some air, Willow restarted the kettle.
As she leaned into the gathering steam, Willow tried to remember how long it was since she’d first met Sam. It had to be almost seven years ago; she’d still felt young when she met him. She remembered sitting in his office while he was supposed to be interviewing her, a wine merchant in need of an assistant, which was quite clear, because the phone had kept ringing every five minutes, interrupting them.
Willow had watched him, pacing up and down mid-conversation, and decided that she liked the look of him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair that was graying slightlyaround the temples and stubble that darkened in the creases of his skin when he smiled. It seemed incongruous somehow, this northern, working-class man in the midst of such a refined, upper-class industry. But he owned it, and Willow liked that about him too; his reassuring gait, his sense of authority all added to the very obvious fact that he needed her.
“Sorry,” Willow remembered Sam muttering. “I’m all at sea here . . . my last girl went off on holiday and never came back. I’m a widower, you see, got a daughter. Chloe, she’s eight. I’m not complaining—I know women have to juggle kids and work all the time. It’s just . . .” He looked embarrassed. “I’m not as good at it as I let on. I need someone who’ll muck in, from the start. Who’ll work long hours, for no extra pay, but all the wine you can drink.”
“I can drink a lot of wine,” Willow had quipped, feeling the heat rise in her neck as he returned her smile.
“Then you are definitely the girl for me,” Sam replied, grinning, and Willow had fallen in love.
Sam treated Willow unlike any other man had before—as an equal, a colleague, not as prey. She loved him precisely because he didn’t see in her all the obvious things that other men noticed first. He didn’t seem at all distracted by the swell of her breasts, the sway of her long hair. She had never once caught him dwelling on her bottom, and the fact that none of that interested Sam in the least made Willow relax around him, knowing that all he expected from her was to do her job. The fact that he liked her, just for her, that he found her funny, clever, resourceful and reliable, thrilled her in a way that sexually charged flirting never would.
Ever keen to impress him, she started picking Chloe up from school every now and then, making dinner so he’d have something hot when he got in. It