The Whole Foods reference elicited an unexpected smile. Sam hadn't had reason to smile in a long time and it showed. There was a rusty quality to it. From disuse, maybe. But if there was one thing Sam could always appreciate, it was inappropriately-timed sarcasm. She lived on the knife's edge of it. And that had happened long before the clown rodeo happened.

"No one's ever really okay here," she said. "There are only two baseline emotions. Abject horror and depressingly long stretches of boredom. Everything in between is just a transition from one to the other."

She paused.

And in a moment of surprising honesty, she added, "Except for loneliness. But that's not really an emotion so much as a state of being."

Wow. She didn't know where that had come from.

Reaching out to swipe a piece of glass before he could get it, her fingers brushed his skin. Oh. Right. That's where it came from. A complete lack of human contact.

She sighed and shook her head. "You're new, aren't you?"