Samantha Hardy

Samantha sighed at the crash from overhead and the giggle that followed. For a heartbeat, she hovered at the edge of the couch, trapped in that moment of hope that the crash and giggle was just a last gasp before sleep overtook him. Then she heard his little feet padding across the floor.

"Two minutes," she exhaled, rubbing at her temple. "My ass almost made it to the sofa this time."

Resigned, she put her faint hopes of a nap aside and headed for the stairs. "Jefferson Adam Hawke, it is naptime," she announced and put a foot on the bottom step, letting it creak. "You know the rules, no nap, no cookies at snack time."

"Cookies!" Came the response from her son's room.

"Nap," she countered.

She counted to sixty, then counted again. One more time around the watchface and she slowly made her way up the stairs, careful to avoid the loose floorboards.

Through the crack in the door, she saw him curled up on his favorite huge teddy bear, fast sleep. "Two speeds," she whispered to herself. "Mach 5 and comatose."

First: Regarding Sam's entry in the Cove. Anyone with ties to Boston, or who closely follows the Boston crime scene, might recognize the guy seen outside Cove cards. He was a known Irish mob enforcer for a lot of years and was jailed about two years ago for attempted murder. Feel free to recognize him or think he reminds your pup of someone they've seen before. I should mention, his name is Sean O'Leary.

Second: I'm off tomorrow morning on a fun filled trip to Ohio and family reunion /sarcasm. 11 of us will be crammed into a smallish house, 3 of the occupants are under 12. I shouldn't have a problem returning tags while I'm there if the internet behaves, I just might be a little slower than usual.

Any and all sanity tweets, texts, emails are greatly appreciated. For those new around here, my family tends to make me nuts.

Peace.

Samantha stood outside the pizza joint and read Roosevelt's latest text. The flutters in her stomach had gone from butterflies to condors and the idea of waiting even ten minutes for a pizza felt like an eternity. With a quick response, she shoved her phone into her purse and headed straight for his place. She was there in five minutes - thank God for small towns - and practically ran up to the door.

She waited, hand to her stomach to quell the flutters and slow her breathing while she waited.

Samantha stood on the boardwalk outside of her shop and stared out at the waves crashing onto the beach. The sound soothed her like no other, as did standing as she was with the wind whipping at her hair and face. It was another reminder that she was here, she was standing; she wasn't in the hospital, she hadn't been shot.

It was just one of those freaky Siren Cove things she'd been told about. Nothing more, nothing less.

It wasn't, or hadn't been, another enforcer out to remove her from the equation.

Even huddled in her long down parka, Samantha gave a shudder. Parkas were nice, but they didn't protect from this kind of cold. This cold was deep down inside her in a place she'd thought long healed.

When her teeth started to chatter, she gave up her solitary stance and turned back to the shop, locking the door behind her. Tomorrow, she told herself. She'd open tomorrow.

She just needed another day to recover, to get her wits back about her, and get on with living this new life she wanted so badly.

Samantha was up with the sun. Not such a tricky thing to do when you lived right on the water and it shined directly into your apartment the second it crested the horizon. Usually she kept her drapes drawn tight against it, but last night she'd left them open to better help her get up in time to start making breakfast.

Which is why she was up, dressed in her yoga pants and a light sweatshirt at 6.45 in the morning on a Saturday with bacon crisping in the oven, beaten eggs in a bowl, and a variety of fillings in little bowls on her kitchen counter. She didn't have a whole lot of room in the studio apartment over her shop, but she made good use of what she had.

Pouring a cup of coffee for herself, she cradled it in her hand and waited for the knock downstairs.

Now that Christmas was over, Samantha had decided to take a little time for herself. She was still working at the shop, but she'd lessened her hours to more the meat of the day without worrying so much about opening early and staying late.

So today, as the sky had started to deepen with dusk, she'd flipped the sign from open to closed, grabbed her jacket and headed out to the water's edge to walk, to think, and to just...be for a while.

You might know Samantha if:

* You shop on the Boardwalk. Samantha runs a stationery store there, Cove Cards, which has high-end stationery, custom cards, ink pens, and does orders for invitations/announcements/etc.

* You're from Boston and followed legal news, as she was once a very high profile assistant district attorney and was shot in front of the courthouse.

* You're Levi Astor

* You run on the beach since Samantha runs every morning

CHARACTER NAME: Samantha Hardy (Sam only to very close friends)



CHARACTER AGE: 29




BACKGROUND & HISTORY:Samantha was orphaned at a young age and handed off to her mother's estranged sister, her last living relative. The house wasn't abusive, but it wasn't overly loving, either. Her Aunt Mary was an emotionally distant business woman with little time for a child of three. Samantha had food, clothing, shelter, and, when the time came, a first class education. Her only role model, though, was a woman who put work first before anything else. Unfortunately, Sam learned that life style a little too well.

When she started school, her teacher soon discovered that Samantha had trouble speaking. One conference with the Aunt was all it took to discover that she had little, if any, interpersonal communication at home. The teacher set her up with a speech therapist and, when she was older, the therapy evolved into her joining the debate team in high school. She was a natural at it, and came in first at the state championships in her junior and senior years. When her aunt died mid-way through her senior year, the state tried to remove Samantha from the house, but she petitioned the family court, on her own, to emancipate herself to avoid foster care for the last six months before her eighteenth birthday. After the proceedings, the judge, impressed by the young woman, found Sam in the hallway and asked if she'd thought about law school. Judge Harris took her under her wing, letting the young Sam clerk for her while she was in college, and then law school, which meant Sam left her bar exam with a wealth of trial experience.

There wasn't much of a decision when it came time to decide her path in the legal world. Tax and real estate law didn't interest her, neither did ambulance chasing. She wanted criminal law and her time with Judge Harris had made her loathe the slick, rich criminal defense lawyers she'd come across. While she could appreciate that some of them were actually fighting to clear innocent people, the majority of them were after exorbitant fees and releasing slime back into the world. So, she set her sights on the PA's office and a goal of being the youngest District Attorney in Boston's history. With that in mind, she took as many high profile cases as she could and threw herself into them, often working 100 hour weeks. Her laser focus on her trials was a boon to the judicial system, but not so much on her personal life. She'd met, and seriously dated a cop she'd met through one case. It was a serious love affair, but too often she'd stand him up for dinner or plans they'd made, too wrapped up in her case to realize she'd even missed the date. When it ended, she'd been sad, but had been in pre-trial for a mafia-related prosecution and channeled any feelings of abandonment into her work.

Successful in that trial, Sam made a name for herself finally and was given even more tension charged cases. She threw herself into them with abandon, positive she was invincible in court, until one day when she left the courthouse late and woke up in a hospital six months later, victim of a near-fatal gunshot wound that left her in a coma. In the fast-paced legal world, six months is forever and when she was finally cleared to return to work, it was to find a new shining star had taken her place and her case load had been reduced to less high-profile trials. That made Sam start to think about a lot of things in her life, and things she'd lost without even realizing in her quest. She realized she'd become like the distant aunt who raised her in such an emotional vacuum. She broke her apartment lease, liquified her assets, packed everything into her Subaru, and left Boston behind her for a town she'd chosen completely by random.




PERSONALITY: Samantha is a woman rediscovering herself. She’s never known love, or not in her conscious memories. She knows, from the few pictures she has, that her parents loved her and loved each other, but she was too young when they died to really register it. Her aunt never showed her any type of affection and Samantha started to think that’s just the way it was for her. When Levi came into her life, full of emotion and attachment, she didn’t know how to react, or how to reciprocate, so it ended badly. She worked though a lot of her residual feelings in the therapy she was placed in as part of her rehab, and now she’s eager to see if she can do better with this second chance at life.

She’s a bit of a pit bull when her back’s against the wall, and she can debate with the rest of them, even if she doesn’t totally believe the side she’s debating. There’s a strong competitive streak in her, but she can lose with aplomb. Not that she wouldn’t spike the football if she scored, but she’s not going to get reckless or pissy if she’s losing. Samantha doesn’t like being wrong, but she’ll freely admit it when she is.



OPINION OF THE RIVALRY: She's new to town so would have to be told about it, and even then she wouldn't raise much of an eyebrow.



LIFESTYLE: Samantha lives above her shop because it feels more expedient and she loves the view of the ocean. It also felt wasteful since the apartment came with the shop front lease. She doesn’t have unlimited funds, but she inherited the bulk of her aunt’s investment portfolio and bank accounts when the woman died and she never touched it. She leads a very simple life. Samantha takes long walks as part of her rehab and though she doesn’t tire as easily as she once did, she’s still rebuilding muscle so she tires easily. She’s not the club type, but she won’t say no to a night out and a few drinks. She cooks for herself most of the time, and will spend a full weekend making large recipes of her favorites and freezing single portion sizes of them for her dinners throughout the month.

Sam has been almost obsessively single after she and Levi parted company. As much as she buried herself in work, she felt the sting of it when the case was over and the long, quiet nights showed her just what she’d lost. Resolved to never cause that kind of pain again, she resolved to keep anything intimate to one night flings to take the edge off and nothing else. When the emptiness of that started to feel even more intense than the guilt, she resolved to stop the bar pick ups. Not long after she was shot and her long recovery forestalled any type of relationship. She wants to feel a connection again, to see if she can find a way to love when she never has before, but she’s perfectly content being on her own and will choose that over something base and empty.



POWERS & ABILITIES: None. Samantha is entirely human, but after her coma, Samantha emerged with something she didn’t expect. Always grounded very much in the real world, it took her a while to accept that sometimes, when she touches objects, she knows things about them. Their past owners, things that happened around them. It doesn’t happen all the time, or with every object, and she can’t do it on command. It doesn’t happen with people at all.



PLAYED BY: Carey Mulligan