Page 21 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

Except I was.

Okay, so the throwing people out of my house part didn’t fit, and I liked to think I was prickly rather than crotchety, but Arthur was the only one who saw me for what I really was. In fact, he’d summed it up so well that I didn’t dare improve on his words.

An echo with nothing and no one to call her own. A friendly facade. An empty smile.

And there it was. The truth in a tiny, impenetrable nutshell, a secret buried so deep inside my heart that I’d thought it would be safe there forever.

I didn’t love Brett Marcowitz, and I didn’t love his family. I didn’t love my parents. I’d never loved any of my old college roommates, and the friends I had now were more like work acquaintances than kindred spirits. Since the day my sister Emily died, her life snuffed short by a hole in her heart that no number of surgeries could fix, I hadn’t loved anyone who didn’t exist between the covers of a book. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I knewhow.

“I have to go, Octavia,” I said, dashing the back of my hand against my cheeks and straightening my posture. “He’s counting on me. If that means you have to fire me, then so be it.”

Octavia threw up her hands. The gesture was meant to convey a feeling of playful frustration, but I knew better. She’d reached the end of her patience. “It’s not an empty threat,” Olivia warned. “Iwillfire you if you disobey my orders. I’m not about to lose my own job over this.”

“And I wouldn’t want you to,” I said. “But it’s not like I have a choice in the matter.”

“Of course you have a choice. Everyone has a choice.”

I shook my head. The thing I couldn’t make Octavia understand was that my fate and Arthur’s had somehow become tangled, and the knot was impossible to undo. Since the day he’d walked into this library, refusing all my book suggestions and overtures of friendship, I’d known that he meant something—that he meant something tome.

If Octavia had any idea how bleak and empty my life had been for all these years, how desperately I’d wanted to feel that human connection again, she’d know. I could no more walk away from Arthur McLachlan than I could my own sister.

She must have gotten an accurate read on my silence because she flattened her lips in a frown. “So that’s it? You’re walking out? Just like that?”

“I am,” I agreed, my voice tight, my chest tighter. “I’m really going to miss you guys.”

I wished I could say that I made a smooth exit after that, with my head held high and an air of cool imperturbability wrapped around me, but I didn’t. I cried and packed a small box of my belongings. I accidentally stole a copy of Amanda Gorman’s latest book of poetry, which I’d been saving at the bottom of my lunch bag for a rainy day. I also discovered, too late, that I’d left my car keys on Octavia’s desk.

In the end, I decided to take the bus and come back for my car another time. Some trials weren’t meant to be borne in the broad daylight.

Slinking back to the only home I’d ever known with my tail between my legs was one of them.

MAISEY

7

You know how it’s possible to just look at some people and tell everything about them?

Take the mailman, for example. Not the regular one—the one who was always on the phone when he slid the mail through the slot, too busy chatting with his girlfriend to notice what he was delivering. I meant the other one. The guy who filled in sometimes. The one who left greasy fingerprints all over my Victoria’s Secret catalogs.

HimI knew.HimI’d dated.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. A man who didn’t eventryto hide that he was spending his lunch break oozing mayonnaise onto the Dream Angels collection was the same no matter where you found him. In a back alley. Creeping outside a club. Peeking into your mail slot in hopes of catching you vacuuming in the nude, and all because you read an article about how airing out your vagina could reduce the incidence of UTIs.

Onetime. I’d done it one time, and up until I’d noticed those wet blue eyes peeping up at me, I’d been feeling pretty good about it, too.

Anyway. It was a talent of mine. A sixth sense of sorts. All it took was one glance, and I could tell if a person was going to be friend or foe.

That sweet curly-haired girl with the purple brooch who sat outside Arthur McLachlan’s house all night? Who barged into his house without warning and even convinced that horrible old man to let me bandage his finger?

She was going to be a friend. I just knew it.

“That guy was here again.” I bounced out my front door to where she was struggling to get several takeout bags out of a city bus. It was the same bus my Bella used to take coming home after her shifts at Paul Bunyan’s, but that wasn’t why I was watching it.

At least, it wasn’t theonlyreason.

The girl looked like she’d had a heck of a day, poor thing, still in last night’s clothes and with red-rimmed eyes, her brooch hanging heavily at her throat. I didn’t ask about any of it. I recognized a heartbreak when it stood in front of me.

“What guy?” she asked as I lifted one of the takeout bags and waved to the bus driver with my free hand. Magda had always been great about letting me know when Bella didn’t get on the bus at her usual time, so I was careful to stay friendly. Moms had to stick together, you know?