Page 65 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“What kind of kid does that?” I asked. “What kind of person? I spentthree daysdown there, Lincoln. I could have died. And all I cared about was how nice it was to look up and see the sky.”

For the longest time, Lincoln didn’t say anything. We both stood there, watching but not watching the march of those hungry ants.

“It’s me, isn’t it?” he asked so suddenly that I twitched. “That’s why you’re so fixated on writing your book all of a sudden?” Misreading my twitch as one of guilt rather than surprise, he was quick to add, “I’d rather hear about it now than a few months down the line. You don’t owe me anything, but I need to know. So I can protect myself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but it was a lie. I knew. I knew down to my very bones.

“You’re moving on,” Lincoln said. “You’re pursuing a new career and new friends, closing the door on your old life before it gets to be too much. And the only thing I can do is stand back and watch it happen.”

The things Lincoln was saying were hurtful for the sole reason that they were so much truer than he knew. Every career I’d had in my life had been in pursuit of something—anything—other than the thing I really wanted. My nursing career? A great way to stay fit and meet cute doctors. Flight attendant? What could be wrong with hitting the skies with promises of a nonstop party lifestyle? The stint with personal training, an MLM menswear scheme that had been a borderline cult, even a few bizarre weeks as a mascot at a theme park in my teens—they’d all been a way to avoid the thing that was staring me in the face.

I’d climbed into a well to hide from the overwhelming influence of the woman who’d given birth to me. Who’d raised me. Who loved me so much that I was terrified of what would happen if I let myself love her back.

And I’d been hiding every single day of my life since.

“You could be an amazing author, Mateo. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.” Lincoln smiled then, but there was no warmth in his expression. “You could be amazing at anything you put your whole heart into. I just wish the thing you were willing to put your heart into was me.”

In that moment, standing in a parking lot with a man I adored, my world expanding and contracting like a breath that wouldn’t end, I was having the hardest time deciding what was happening. Was I being dumped? Chastised?Begged?

I wanted to believe that Lincoln was about to pull me into his arms and declare his everlasting devotion, to promise to climb down the well with me the next time I needed a break from the too-bright colors of the world, but he mostly looked exhausted. That expression only got worse when Sloane came rushing out of the restaurant, Brett a few paces behind her.

One look at her stricken expression, and I knew something terrible had happened.

“Arthur?” I asked, what was left of my heart thumping wildly.

“We have to get over there. Maisey said she found him collapsed in the living room. I’m afraid we might be too late.”

GREG

22

Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved his mother very, very much. His love for her was so great that when she lay on her deathbed, clutching her son’s hand with all the strength that remained in her racked, wrecked body, she extracted a promise from him.

“Fix it,” she’d said, her voice surprisingly strong. The hospice nurses had said to expect that, a final burst of energy before she slipped into the coma that would eventually claim her, but I’d assumed she’d request a cheeseburger or remind me to turn off the stove, not send me across the state to repair a relationship she’d broken a long time ago. “He’s all you have left. You owe it to him—and yourself—to try.”

Such was the boy’s love for her that he did what she said. Not right away, and not with anything approaching enthusiasm, but when fate left him with no other choice.

Fuck.What a mess that was turning out to be.

“Ha! I knew it. This is a trap. This has been a trap from the beginning.”

I sat at the far end of my grandfather’s living room, my feet swinging from the end of the hospital bed that he refused to sleep in. It was similar to the model we’d had installed in my mom’s house once she’d entered hospice. If you could ignore the way the plastic mattress crinkled and crackled every time you moved, it was pretty comfortable.

“What kind of librarian has a stethoscope in the trunk of his car?” my grandfather asked as Mateo sat on his haunches, listening to the thump of a heart that had stopped doing anything beyond the basics years ago. Pump and squeeze, keep the body alive.

But never, under any circumstances, relent.

“This doesn’t work if you’re shouting at me the whole time,” Mateo said as he ran through what remained of his medical checklist. He’d already taken my grandfather’s temperature and blood pressure—both normal—and was now moving on to his breathing. “I need to listen to your lungs, but I can’t do that unless you calm down first.”

I swung myself from my perch. In my experience, telling anyone—especially a man with as little patience as this one—to calm down rarely resulted in anything but an increase of hostilities. Placing myself carefully at Mateo’s back, I crossed my arms and glared. It was a look I’d inherited from my grandfather, so I knew how effective it could be. He opened his mouth, saw me standing there, and closed it again.

He might have been a bastard of the highest degree, but he was no fool.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “Listen to my breathing, if that’s what gets you through the day. But I’ll be damned if I’m letting you stay in my book club after this.”

“Yourbook club?” Sloane asked. She’d come in with Mateo, but so far she hadn’t done anything more than hold Maisey’s hand and pat it in a soothing way. “You didn’t want anything to do with it, remember?”

Since Mateo was listening intently to my grandfather’s breathing, no one bothered to reply to this. With an efficiency that spoke well of his experience, Mateo sat back and draped the stethoscope around his neck.