Page 85 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

When Sloane turned toward me, her smile now permanently fixed, I realized my error. I’d given this girl carte blanche to ransack my piles of books, to nose through my home for as many hours as she pleased. And shedidplease. Many a morning, I’d come down to find her sleeping on the couch, one of my prized first editions lying open on her chest. For a woman who’d dedicated her life to the care and keeping of books, she was alarmingly lax in the way she treated mine.

There was only one other woman who’d dared to treat my books like that, sweeping them into her arms with a laugh on her lips and the light of battle in her eyes. Sloane didn’t look a thing like my Genie, but their souls had been forged of the same liquid fire. It was the only thing to ever penetrate the hard protective exoskeleton that bound me.

“That’s easy,” Sloane said. “Of all the books you have in your personal library, that one has the most highlighted passages. It obviously means something to you. Something big.”

That was when I knew I was done for. If Sloane had seen my highlights, if she’d flipped through those pages and pieced the words together, then she knew.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one. Nigel crowed out with triumph and a slap of his hand on his knee. “The secret’s out now,” he said, thus sealing my exoskeleton shut forever. “That saccharine, antiquated piece of girlish nonsense is his favorite book in the whole world.”

***

“I’m sorry to have taken you by surprise, old chap.” Nigel cornered me on the way to the bathroom—the one place I was allowed to go when I needed to be alone. Not even Mateo playing nurse was brave enough to follow me there. “But I knew you wouldn’t agree to see me any other way.”

“You didn’t take me by surprise,” I grumbled. “Do you have any idea how transparent that group of children back there is? They’ve been skulking around here for weeks, waving your dirty old handkerchiefs around and pretending like I’m hard of hearing. I knew it was only a matter of time before you pushed your way in here.”

He smirked in a way that yanked me back through time and dumped me unceremoniously on the floor. That smirk had been a cause of extreme jealousy in my twenties; I could scowl and frown with the best of them, but Nigel was too smooth for that. He was all affectation and cool disdain, James Bond the way Ian Fleming intended him.

“Twenty thousand dollars to a small local library, Nigel?” I grunted to demonstrate what I thought of his tactics. “Don’t you think that was a touch heavy-handed?”

“It got your attention, didn’t it?”

“So would walking naked down Sherman Avenue, only it would have been a hell of a lot easier on your retirement plan.”

He had the audacity to laugh at that. Or at me. I couldn’t tell which.

“I’m not so hard-pressed that I can’t spare a little of my savings for a good cause.” He peered down the dark hallway, which had only grown darker as of late thanks to the stacks of books lining the walls. Sloane was making great progress on my collection, but her organizational approach was somewhat…haphazard. “I could write you out a check, too, if you want one.”

“I don’t need your charity,” I said. Lest he get the wrong impression, I added, “Or your profound insights intoAnne of Green Gables, so don’t bother coming back. Our book club isn’t currently taking members.”

“Please, Arthur?” Nigel asked, this time without a trace of Bond in him. “I know we didn’t part on the best of terms”—he paused at the sound of my loud harrumph before trying again—“but it would mean a lot to me.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with this. Sincerity wasn’t a thing Nigel and I had ever shared before. Competition, yes. Antipathy, you bet. That was just the way of academia, even back in the seventies. There were only so many slots at the top, and Nigel and I had both been determined to secure one.

“I was sorry to hear about Eugenia’s passing, by the way,” he said. From his choice of words, I could tell he was posing this as an afterthought, but there was nothingafterabout it; Genie had been dead these thirty-three years and more. This was a calculated attack, even if I didn’t understand where it was coming from.

I had nothing this man wanted. Not anymore.

“Hannah, too,” he added. “She was so young. They both were.”

That was as far as I was willing to go. Trapped in a hallway or not, I wasn’t going to stand here and listen to him list all the people I’d lost.

“That’s right,” I said, my spine stacking until I almost stood upright. “You win. I’m all alone in the world now. T. S. Eliot was always one of your favorites, wasn’t he? ‘Hell is oneself, Hell is alone.’ Truer words have never been written.”

Laughing, cheerful voices from the living room carried down toward us, swept along on the scent of the homemade rosemary focaccia that Maisey had baked that morning.

“Maybe notallalone,” Nigel said softly.

I could have cursed the book club for choosing that moment to revel in their hilarity. In fact, Ididcurse it, though Nigel had heard those words so many times they didn’t hold much weight.

“Is that your way of saying I can stay?” Nigel said. For some reason, he suddenly looked about twenty years older. “I hate to beg, but it would mean a lot to me. I haven’t readAnne of Green Gablesin ages. Not since—”

I flung up my hand, unwilling to let him take one step closer to the edge—or to drag me with him. “Fine. If you insist. I’m not going to kick a dog when he’s down.”

“Not even when the dog in question is me?”

That wrung a reluctant smile from me. “I’ve always had a soft spot for a mangy old cur.”

“And for a soft-spoken woman with big words and even bigger ideas?”