Her friends have been texting me since I got here. Asking to hang out. Checking in on me. But the thing is, they’re her friends. I like them, but sometimes I get tired of being the little sister. Although I’m not averse to seeing them, I’d rather do it with her.
“I know,” I say. “That’s totally, one hundred percent the reason why I’m having dinner with Blue tonight.”
She grins at me. “Uh-huh. So you’re telling me about the article now, because it will soon no longer be a secret.”
“Busted.”
We talk a little longer, and by the time we hang up, I’m feeling a lot better.
There’s still an hour left before I need to leave to meet Blue, so I sit down with my old friend Google. Because it occurs to me that Cal’s status as an uncooperative subject isn’t the only reason I’ve avoided an intense Google session on him.
Part of me wants to grant him the privacy he’s so desperate to protect.
But I can’t do that anymore. Not if I want to get to the bottom of why he started the club—because it’s beginning to seem pretty definite that he did, or that he at least played a big part in it.
I do an image search first, to make sure the Cal I find is the one I’m looking for. His picture pops up, and my heart thumps at the sight of him, because my heart is an idiot. Lust, Molly, it’s just lust.
I scroll through the findings, and I gasp at the sight of Cal next to a hulking woodworking machine. A gorgeous rocking chair sits beside him, and he has a proud grin on his face. The implication is obvious: he made it. That shoots straight to my ovaries. I’ve never been with a man who creates instead of destroys, and it’s mad sexy.
Is he a carpenter? I know he does home renovations, but making furniture is different. It’s a labor of love. I know this because I wrote an article on Amish teens on Rumspringa. I was supposed to ask them about all the wild shit they were doing, and I did, but I ended up having a two-hour conversation with one of them about furniture making.
I keep scrolling for a few minutes, then shift back to the articles.
It doesn’t take me long to find the obituary for Cal’s wife.
A bucket of ice might as well have been upended on my head.
She died in a car crash, just like my parents.
She was only twenty-nine.
Shit, shit, shit.
I close out the browser window, because it suddenly feels like I’ve snuck into his house, made myself a sandwich, and pulled his diary out of his underwear drawer. Maybe snagged a pair of boxer briefs while I was at it.
Okay, there’s no way Cal keeps a diary, but even so. I feel like the sneak that he thinks I am. No wonder he wants to keep away from me—the last thing he needs is to be steeped in the grief again. To be reminded of the thing he can never forget.
I knew when I first met him that he’d lost someone. There was a look of understanding in his eyes when I told him about my parents. But I hadn’t expected this. I’d thought maybe he’d lost his parents too. Or a friend. Or, hell, a well-loved dog.
This is the kind of big that makes me want to back off and forget this whole venture. And yet, a little voice in me, the journalist, says, Now you know why he did it. Now you know why he started the club. It really was him.
And I’m pleased by the possibility that he did it for selfless reasons. That it started from a good place, no matter how much Augusta warped it with her awful filter. That it wasn’t a crock designed to hoodwink people, but rather something good, intended to help them. That he really is the decent man he seems to be.
Something deep inside me wants to believe that.
I’m tempted to cancel dinner with Blue, to take an evening off to reflect on this new information and what it means for my story. To decide whether I should back off.
But I think of Harry, who met with me even though Cal didn’t want him to, because he was upset by Augusta’s lies. Because he didn’t think she should get away with it. And hell, I don’t want her to get away with it either. A lot of readers have listened to her, and if she’s gotten it wrong, intentionally, they deserve to know that. They have a right to know what’s in the Kool-Aid they’re drinking, and who ladled it out.
There’s also a little voice inside me that still yearns to know why Cal hasn’t set the record straight.
Why would he let someone twist and steal what he built?
In a weird way, I find myself wanting to protect him and this thing he made.
I’d expected Blue would bring her husband to dinner, or some of Maisie’s other friends, and that I’d need to come up with some ruse to tear her away for a private talk. And, sure enough, she’s not alone when I step into the restaurant, a Mexican place called Dos Sombreros. Blue’s the kind of person you could spot anywhere, given she’s ridiculously beautiful, like a mix of Snow White and Rapunzel with her long black hair and bright blue eyes. There are two other people at the table, and to my surprise, the one facing me is none other than Harry Brown a.k.a. Conspiracy Nut. Their companion, seated opposite them, has a wild pink pixie cut.
Harry’s eyes widen when he sees me, and he leans in and whispers something to the others.
I head on back, and the third member of their party leaps to her feet. She’s pretty in an antagonistic way that suggests she’d just as soon punch someone as shake their hand, and I recognize her instantly—Jealous Girlfriend. Nicole. She has a nose ring and a fierce look in her eyes that identifies her as a force to be reckoned with.
What a delight! I’ve been trying to round them up, working the information I have from all angles, and they’ve ambushed me.
“You’re the one who keeps calling my phone and hanging up?” Nicole asks in a growl.
“Guilty as charged,” I say, lifting up a hand.
Her expression darkens. “That’s something mistresses do, you know. I thought my boyfriend was cheating on me. I spent two hours searching through Damien’s phone last night. You cost me two hours of sleep.”
Interesting. Harry’s still paranoid, and Nicole’s clearly still jealous. Whatever the Bad Luck Club has done for them, and I’m not discounting that it’s done something, it clearly hasn’t cured them of all their woes.
Blue pulls Nicole down. “Nicole, that’s not why we’re here.” Turning to me, she asks, “Why don’t you sit down, Molly? We have a pitcher of margaritas coming.”
“Oh, thank God,” I say, sitting in the empty chair next to Nicole.
Harry nods to me, his cheeks a little pink. “Sorry I left suddenly the other day. I…” He shrugs as if to say he doesn’t care to explain, which is fine. We both understand that he freaked out and split. “I knew you looked familiar, which put me on edge, but you’re Maisie’s sister?”
“So my parents said.”
“I like Maisie,” he says. “We all used to hang out more before—” He mimes a big pregnant belly. “I adopted my turtle from her.”
News to me that Maisie’s ever rescued a turtle, but I’m not surprised. Even though her shelter is, well, a dog shelter, she’s never met an animal she didn’t want to save.
“Speak for yourself,” Nicole says with a huff.
“I was.” He rolls his eyes. “No one thinks you adopted a turtle. You killed the cactus I gave you for Christmas.”