The shock packed such a punch, I nearly passed out. The policewoman led me into the house, then to the sofa while her partner brought me a glass of water and my cell phone from the kitchen counter. They called my father and stayed until he arrived a short while later, his eyes wide in disbelief. He was the one who called Alice’s parents.
They rushed over, Alice’s father’s eyes red from tears. Her mother took charge, feeding us in the middle of the night despite the fact that no one was hungry. To my relief, she took charge of the funeral too, because despite the heavy, stifling weight of my grief, I felt like an imposter. Like our marriage had been a lie, only no one around me knew the truth.
A rustling sound jolts me, and I glance around, paranoid that Molly followed me, even though I kept checking the rearview mirror as I drove away from the tea shop. I’m probably being stupid, but maybe not. She’s nothing if not tenacious. It’s a quality I would admire if it weren’t currently turned against me. I tried to give her what I thought she wanted, but the situation is much worse than I led myself to believe. That’s what I get for assuming a dating blogger would only be interested in writing about dating. Then I remember what she said about assumptions.
Score one for you, Molly. I definitely made an ass out of myself.
I made a scene before I left the tea shop, and I never make scenes. I usually hang in the background, letting the world pass me by. Sure, I run our construction business, but other than the Bad Luck Club, I have no personal life. The accident drove a wedge between me and the friends I had before, because I am no longer the person I was before.
Now, Molly O’Shea is getting to me, and I’m not sure how to handle it. Do I sit back and let her unearth my secrets? Is there any way I can stop her?
Would it be so terrible if they do come to light?
I rest my hand on Alice’s tombstone, and a familiar surge of fury flashes through me, but I quickly snuff it out. My life ended that night too. While I know other men have lost their wives to accidents, my situation is different. Alice didn’t want to have the conversation that turned into a vicious argument. I forced her to stay. To face the truth. In the end, she ran out sobbing…and died less than ten minutes later.
I walk back to my car, feeling anxious and unsettled, as if the bottom of this existence I’ve cobbled together with construction paper and glue is about to drop out. I take a deep breath and push it out. There’s no way Molly will unearth that truth about Alice. It’s too buried, and yet…Molly’s the sort who grabs on to something and doesn’t let go. A required character trait for reporters and, I suppose, stalkers. Although Molly doesn’t seem like the stalker type. Well, not the I’m going to sneak into your house and wear your clothes and sniff your underwear type. More like the I know you’re hiding something and I’m going to figure it out type.
What I can’t get is her obsession with the Bad Luck Club. Sure, it had its fifteen minutes of fame when the book came out, and Augusta dragged her time in the spotlight out to twenty minutes, but it’s not that newsworthy. Augusta’s book is a stew of plagiarism and lies, and that’s a story. People outside of the publishing world likely won’t care, though, or at least they won’t care for long. Bottom line: we’re just a bunch of people trying to figure out our shit and move on with our lives. Nothing interesting or unique about that.
Newsworthy or not, I know that Molly will keep digging until she’s satisfied she’s learned everything worth knowing.
It occurs to me that I can still control this narrative. That I can tell her enough to satisfy her curiosity, to encourage her to get a new job where she can write about cooking meatloaf in beer cans and matching bras with the locations of dates. But one thing is for sure—I can’t just hope for the best and do nothing. Because if I sideline myself, I’ll have no control over which rocks she turns over. Or how many. And if she turns over enough of them, someone will talk. The others from the original group are particularly outraged by Augusta’s lies, given that we were all featured heavily in her book, and while I’d rather they stuck to rules one and two, I understand their frustration.
None of them know the truth about Alice, not even my father. Only two other people know the full story. One of them will never talk, and I’m shocked the other didn’t spill the beans in her “tell-all” book. Her dedication was warning enough.
To Cal. You know why.
Yeah, Augusta. I do.
When someone joins the Bad Luck Club, they’re required to tell their sponsor why they want to join. They’re supposed to expose the deepest, rawest parts of their souls. Dad believes that facing our inner darkness is the first step in overcoming it. But to make the sponsee more comfortable about sharing their truths, the sponsor shares their story first.
Augusta was my first sponsee. At the time, I wasn’t fully on board with the idea of the club, but it had been several months since Alice’s death, and the guilt was festering like a wound from a rusty nail. I hadn’t told the police that Alice was hysterical when she left, but I had told them we’d fought and she’d taken off to get some space. No one knew the cause of the fight, and surprisingly no one had ever asked.
Until that night.
Not for the first time, I wish I’d never told Augusta the truth. But the pain and guilt over Alice’s death were consuming me. My nights were filled with nightmares and my days with anxiety. Augusta was reluctant to share her story with me, so I’d offered her a beer and popped open another for myself (I’d already had two), and before I knew it, I was pouring out my heart to her, telling her everything. Maybe it was the alcohol in my bloodstream. Or maybe it was because she was a stranger. It was likely a combination of the two, but Augusta had listened in what I would later learn was uncharacteristic silence and without judgment. When I finished, I told her that I’d never told anyone before, and I would appreciate her keeping my secret. She’d looked me square in the eyes, and said in a solemn voice that she’d carry my secret to her grave. And strangely enough, I’d believed her.
Even after we asked her to leave the club.
Even after she went berserk and tried to burn down our flip house, among other things.
Because I knew her secrets too, and she was as careful with them as I was with mine.
I believed that this, and some shredded remnants of loyalty, would be enough for her to keep her silence.
Right up until her book came out.
Fifteen minutes later, I walk into the office, and one look at Willow tells me I screwed up.
Her gaze pins on me with laser focus. “Where’s my tea?”
Grimacing, I say, “Sorry. I completely forgot.”
“Were you too busy getting the client to sign on the dotted line?”
“No.” I shake my head as I move to my desk and plop into my chair, turning my back to her. “It didn’t work out.”
“At least tell me you had your tea leaves read,” she says in exasperation.
“Sorry,” I say, booting up my computer and keeping my eyes on the screen. “Didn’t stick around long enough to have them read.”
“Maybe that’s because you ordered iced tea,” she says. “It typically doesn’t have tea leaves.”
I freeze. It might have been a lucky guess on her part, but something in her self-satisfied tone tells me otherwise. I slowly turn my chair to face her.