The Match (It Happened in Charleston 1)

I choose not to dissect exactly why she felt the need to clarify that and move on.

“Did you email her?”

Sam dodges my gaze and looks down at her hot chocolate. She bites her lips together and then crinkles her nose. That’s really not fair. She knows that’s her secret weapon to get out of trouble, and she’s using it now.

“If I admit to it, am I going to be in trouble?” Sam was only born ten years ago, but I swear, she’s sixteen.

I refuse to look at Evi

e. There’s no need. I’ll be done with her in five minutes, and she’ll be on her way, and I’ll never think of her and her cute accent again. “How about if you fess up to it now, I’ll only take away your iPad for one week instead of two?”

Most kids pout right about now. Not Sam.

“Five days and you have a deal.” Her brown eyes look up at me, and she’s Natalie in the flesh. This girl is going to be trouble.

I can hear Miss Jones try to hide a chuckle from beside me, but I still refuse to look at her.

“One week. It was wrong of you to go behind my back, and you know it.” I go easy on Sam because, honestly, she’s a good kid, and I know that even though she looks tough, she’ll cry in her pillow tonight if she knows she has disappointed me. And even though I’ll never admit it to her, I’m impressed that she managed to hack into my email, impersonate me to set up this meeting, and then convince me to take her out for hot chocolate at the agreed meeting place.

I hope she channels this cleverness to cure cancer one day and not to rob a bank.

“Okay,” says Sam, tucking a lock of her dark-brown hair behind her ear. “I’m sorry.”

Sam and I smile at each other for a minute, and I think I’ve handled this situation well. I don’t always come out on top of these parenting moments, but this one feels like a win.

Miss Jones clearing her throat beside me reminds me that I’ve still got a loose thread to tie up.

Or cut off.

I turn to the woman beside me and force my eyes to see her without really seeing her. “I’m sorry to have wasted your morning, Miss Jones. But as you can see, there was a little miscommunication between my daughter and me.” I’m just about to turn my back to this woman and join Sam at the table when Miss Jones speaks up.

“The morning doesn’t have to be a waste. I’m already here, and I have all my information with me. If you’re interested, we could still—”

“I’m not interested,” I say, cutting her off.

I can tell I’ve startled her, because her glittering green eyes are wide and her lips are separated. I don’t want to be a jerk to this woman, but I’m also not in the mood to deal with her or her sunny smile. And definitely not her long legs that I’m refusing to notice. Is she wearing tennis shoes with a dress? Did she jog here? Never mind. I don’t care. Miss Jones needs to go.

“It was nice to meet you, and again, I’m sorry for taking up your morning.” There. I said it in a way that was final but still nice enough that people will want to cast me in a children’s television show where I pull on a red sweater and pretend to like everyone.

I glance at Sam, and she looks so disappointed that it physically hurts me somewhere in my chest. I know she thinks having a service dog is going to solve all of her problems, but she’s wrong. A dog can’t keep her safe. But I can, and I will. I’m not about to just step back and let a dog do the responsibility that is mine. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that I can’t trust anyone else to love and care for my daughter the way I do. Definitely not a dog.

“Are you sure you don’t want to hear just a little bit about the company or our process? I’ll even go so far as to mention that no question is too silly.” This woman is unbelievable. I’ve already sat down, and she’s making me drag my gaze back up to her.

“In the email, it said that your daughter has epilepsy.” Miss Jones’s smile grows as if we are talking about a mutual favorite TV show rather than a life-altering disability. It grates on me. She looks down at her dog, and her smile grows more devastating. “This is Charlie. He’s been trained as a seizure-assist dog, but he also alerts—”

I hold up my hand to stop her. I’m not proud of how condescending that made me look, but honestly, this woman is just not taking the hint, and I want her to go away. “I don’t think you’re understanding. We don’t want to hear about your company or the dog.”

“No, you don’t want to hear about the dog,” Sam says under her breath but at a volume definitely meant for me to hear it.

I look at Sam and prepare to tell her to watch it because she’s already on thin ice when Miss Jones pipes in again. “If Sam is interested, I would really love to get to tell you about Charlie and how he’s—”

Now, before you judge too harshly what I say next, you should know that I’ve had a bad week. Nothing has gone right. I’ve been looking into private schools for Sam to attend in the fall where they can give her more attention than she’d get in her public school, and she’s hated every single one of them that we’ve toured. I’ve had to tell her that she can’t go to Jenna Miller’s eleventh birthday party sleepover three times, and I had to deal with Sam storming up the stairs all three of those times with the words I hate you lingering in the air between us.

On top of all this, she had a longer than usual seizure last week that scared the heck out of me, and I haven’t slept in the past six months since she was diagnosed. I can’t stand the thought of her having a seizure in the night and me not knowing about it, so I get out of bed at least fifteen times a night to check on her before I usually just give up and make a pallet on her floor.

Because of all these things, I stand up so fast that my chair scrapes, and everyone in the coffee shop turns to watch me be a complete jerk to this woman.

“Stop. I told you we don’t want to hear about your company’s dog. I don’t know if you're hard up for the cash or what, but you should know that you’re coming across as an annoying car salesman about to get fired if he doesn’t meet his quota for the week.”