Page 94 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“Yes, but don’t blame her for it. She’d had no other choice. I was too stupid and stubborn to—”

Nigel coughed. “I think you’re forgetting one.”

If there was a way to bring a man to ruin using only the power of a stare, I’d have ended all three of us on the spot. As it was, the only thing I could do was agree.

“Fine,” I said. “I was too stupid and stubborn and—yes—scared to tell her the truth.”

“The truth?” Greg echoed.

“That I loved her. That I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. That even though I didn’t have any money to my name or a fraction of Nigel’s smarmy British charm, I could make her happy.” I blamed my weakened lungs for the way my voice cracked, but they both knew. Greg because he was my blood, and Nigel because he’dalwaysknown. “I did it, too. I’m a terrible man and an even worse father, but Genie and I were happy together. That’s the thing your mother probably never told you, Greg. I did a lot of things wrong where Hannah was concerned—so many things, each one stacking up on top of each other until she had no choice but to run away to avoid the crash—but once upon a time, we were a family.”

I was almost panting by the time I was done, adrenaline pumping my heart much faster than Mateo would have been happy with, but at least I’d lived to tell the tale.

Until Greg replied.

“She told me,” he said. “About the before…and about the after. She always used to say that you used up every ounce of your love on Grandma so that when she died, there was none left for my mom.”

Something wild may have broken out of me then, but Nigel pressed his hand on top of mine, holding it in. “Tell him the rest, Arthur. About how you won Genie back, about the way you finally opened up your heart to her so that she had a real choice in the matter.”

I didn’t see what good that would do. The burden of the past was already becoming too much to bear, weighing down on my soul until if felt as flat as my heart.

“I don’t see how it will help,” I grumbled. “It’s not like I can just give Sloane my entire library and tell her to skim the pages. She’s already seen them. She already knows. That trick pony doesn’t have any legs left to stand on.”

Greg bolted up from his seat, once again jolting poor Nigel to the point of wincing. One of the worst things about all these blasted young people was that they had no sympathy for joints that had worn down every bit of elasticity they had.

“Do you mean the highlighted passages?” Greg asked as he pulled a book at random from the shelf above his bed. It was on the tip of my tongue to direct him to literally any other bookshelf in the house, since Sloane had cleared that one to make way for his belongings, but the volume he held out wasn’t one of mine. It was his copy ofThe Joy Luck Club. I could tell because I’d have been caught dead before I’d buy a movie poster tie-in of any piece of literature. As he handed the book to me, it fell open to a page with a highlight across the bottom.

I read it aloud before I realized what it was.

“‘So that morning, while my mother was dying, I was dreaming.’”

I’d read about people’s faces draining of color more times than I could count, but it wasn’t until that moment that I actuallyfeltit happen.

“Greg.” The book trembled in my hand, but I didn’t know what else to say. Only “Greg.”

He smiled ruefully and took the book from me. “Until I got here, I never realized it was a family trait. I should’ve known. Mom always encouraged it, though she never told me why. She just said that when I couldn’t find the words to say what was in my heart—when my throat got too tight and all I wanted to do was boil over—I could always find myself in a book.”

“That was how your grandfather did it, too,” Nigel said. “Won your grandmother back, I should say. I didn’t even realize what was happening until I saw a copy ofAnne of Green Gablesclutched in her hand. Yourgrandfather’scopy, crisscrossed and colored through like a children’s Bible.”

I still had that copy, though time hadn’t treated it well. I’d gone back through those pages so many times that they almost disintegrated to the touch.

“I sent it by overnight mail. Fifty bucks, it cost me. Back then, that was a pretty penny.” These words weren’t the right ones—I never could find them, even after all this time—so I took a deep breath and tried again. “As soon as Genie got the book, she understood what I was trying to say. That she had a place with me, ahomewith me. After that, she never asked me for any kind of declaration of love. She knew that if she needed to understand what was in my heart, all she had to do was pick up whatever I was reading at the time, and she’d see it.”

She was in every book I’d ever read, every tale that had ever touched my heart. Fiction and nonfiction, memoir and short story—no matter what I read, I always found her. It was why I resorted so often to thrillers and German philosophy in my declining years, even though Sloane did her best to steer me away from them.

Some days, I needed her to be near. Most days, I couldn’t bear the pain.

“Well, that’s it, then.” Greg liftedThe Joy Luck Clubfrom my hands with a reverence that needed no explanation. If that was the book where his mother—my daughter—dwelled, then I understood exactly how important it was to him. “You know what you have to do.”

“I’m not giving her my copy ofAnne of Green Gables,” I said. “I’m sorry, Greg, but I can’t. It’s too valuable.”

“We’ll buy her a new one,” he promised, and in a tone of authority I didn’t recognize. “And you and I will go through it, line by line, to pick out the ones that say what you need them to. Once you explain what they mean, she’ll know what you’re saying. She’s too smart of a person not to.”

“But what if doesn’t work?” I asked. “What if she leaves anyway?”

I was careful not to look at Nigel. He didn’t know it, but the three days it had taken for my book to be delivered to Genie and for Genie to be delivered back to me had been the longest of my life. In an age without cell phones and social media, all I’d been able to do was wait. And hope.

I hadn’t hoped for anything like that in a long time.