Page 32 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“No, you don’t. You’re just afraid of what happens when the stability goes away.”

“Wait.” Sloane tried to snatch her hand back. “What are you talking about? That’s not on my palm.”

She was right—it wasn’t. But itwasin the way she showed up here every day, determined to help an old man who’d done nothing to deserve it. It was in the way she’d quietly and gently removed her fiancé from this house, unwilling to let him upset the delicate balance she’d managed to reach. It was in the way she always looked a little bit startled when someone was nice to her, as if it could be taken away at any moment.

This wasn’t a girl who liked chaos. This was a girl who did everything she could to keep things on an even keel.

“You and your fiancé will be very happy together, that much I see for sure. But he’s not your great passion.”

“Arthur, you wretch.” Sloane managed to yank her hand free and turned toward the couch, where Arthur smacked his lips with something like satisfaction. “You put her up to this, didn’t you? You told her what to say.”

He put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Acquit me, my dear. I’d have chosen a more reliable tool for the job.”

I was pretty sure that was an insult, but I didn’t dwell on it—partly because I felt smug at having hit the nail on the head, and partly because I realized I’d just had my first literary breakthrough.

“You’re a lot like Stevens.” I returned my attention to the dog-eared paperback in front of me. Arthur had actually groaned when he saw what I’d done to the pages, but since he’d taken a highlighter to his own copy, I didn’t see what right he had to judge mine. “He wanted stability so much that he spent his whole life serving a man who never appreciated it. Or who appreciated him.”

“Maisey!” Sloane protested, but it was no use.

“I was right,” I insisted. “Itisa sad book.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Arthur put his hands down and looked at me with a new light in his eyes. “The housewife might not be as bad at this as I feared.”

10

“Quick, Bella. I need you to run outside and accost a strange man.”

I dashed down the hallway and stopped outside my daughter’s door, where a not-so-invisible line separated her room from the rest of the house. The piece of masking tape she’d put across the threshold was so dirty it was practically black, but I knew better than to touch it.

Or to cross over it.

“Ohmigod, Maisey. You can’t ask a teenager to do that. Don’t you know anything about how the world works?”

I stiffened at the sound of thatMaisey. She only called me by my first name to get under my skin, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.

“I meant that you need to run outside and accost a strange man under my careful supervision,” I corrected myself. “I just need you to pop out and lower his defenses. If he sees me coming, he’ll drive off before we get anywhere.”

The look my daughter leveled on me was full of meaning in the way only a sixteen-year-old could manage.You’re an idiot, that look said.I can’t believe you gave birth to me.Maybe that man drives off because he wants nothing to do with you.

That might have sounded like a mouthful for a pair of brown eyes ringed with so much eyeliner that I had to buy new pillowcases every time she stayed over, but you had to trust me on this one. They were very talkative eyes.

“Please, Bella?” I put my hands up in a pleading gesture. It was the same one she’d used when she was a little girl and wanted an extra spoonful of powdered sugar on her French toast; the same one she’d pulled out when she’d first begged me not to fight the petition for custody changes. “I know it sounds weird, but it’s not for me. It’s for some friends of mine.”

That got Bella’s attention. She even pulled out one of her earpods. The tinny, echoing sound of a K-pop band filled the air. “What friends?”

She didn’t ask this question in a cruel way. At least, I didn’tthinkit was meant to be cruel. The one weekend a month she spent with me wasn’t enough for us to keep up-to-date on each other’s social lives, so she might have been genuinely curious.To be fair,Ikept pretty close tabs onher, thanks to her TikTok account and an Instagram feed that seemed to be mostly pictures of her attempts at the perfect cat’s-eye, but there wasn’t a lot of reciprocation. My last post only got two likes, and one of them had been from a bot trying to sell me life insurance.

“You don’t know them,” I said, sounding more defensive than I cared for. “They’re new.”

“Ew. Did you find them on an app or something?”

“Not exactly.” I cast a quick look over my shoulder, fearful that Arthur’s stalker would drive away before I had a chance to send Bella out for information. “Look, will you do it or not? I already got a picture of his license plate, so if he kidnaps you, it should be easy to track you down again.”

“Mom!”

I was so happy to hear that word from her lips that I forgot everything else. “See, Bella? Youdoknow how to say it.”

She unfolded herself from the bed with the long limbs and easy grace of a teenager who knew herself to hold all the cards. “If I do this, will you let me spend the night at Hilary’s like I wanted to?”