I chuckled around a bite of marinara sauce while the three ladies argued it out. The book had been a bit wordy. Of course, maybe even occasionally boring. Somewhat repetitive. I’d predicted every romantic scene almost to the moment. Maybe I knew romance a little too well. It was hard to surprise me these days.
My phone buzzed against my thigh and caused a somersault in my stomach. Maybe it would be from JJ. I snuck a quick glance at my screen. A text from Bethany. I shoved it back into my pocket without opening it.
“Helloooo?” Stella crooned.
My head popped up. Three suspicious sets of eyes were locked on me. I ignored the buzz of another message.
“Sorry.”
Grace lifted a thin eyebrow. “And who is more important than Laird MacLean?”
“Just a message from Bethany.”
Leslie pointed a fork at me. “That aside, something is going on. You’re so quiet tonight. You had no opinion on the first-kiss scene in the forest? Come on. Spill it. What happened? We’re as much a gossip club as a book club.”
“She’s right,” Grace whispered to Stella, who nodded. “We do gossip a lot.”
I swallowed hard. There was no point in lying to them. They were experienced women and could always see right through me.
Plus, I needed the help.
“Um, yes. Something did happen. With JJ Bailey and me.”
“Now there’s a man I’d like to see in a romance novel,” Grace said with a conspiratorial gleam in her eyes.
Leslie leaned forward, lasagna dripping off her fork. “Does this have something to do with the accident?”
“Accident?” Grace cried. “What accident?”
“Tune into the local news once in a while, Grace,” Stella said in exasperation. “She drove her car off a cliff, and he saved her as she was falling.”
“Then her home burned to cinders,” Leslie added.
“But those were two separate incidents,” Stella clarified.
“It’s like a romance novel,” Grace muttered.
With a sigh, I related the events in full. Such drama-loving women were the perfect audience. They gasped, snorted, and sighed in all the right places. Until I told the whole story, I didn’t realize how badly I’d needed to say it all. When I finished, the lasagna sat cold on our plates. All of them stared at me owlishly, blinking with stunned expressions.
“Well,” Stella murmured. “That is quite the couple of weeks you’ve had.”
“I just can’t turn into Mama,” I mumbled, then looked past them at the cold, dark remains of the Frolicking Moose outside. “She had it all wrong.”
Grace slammed a hand on the table. “Disagree.”
The rattling silverware made me jump. Startled, I looked at her in surprise. “What?”
“You have it all wrong.”
“How? I’m trying to save him and myself.”
“You’re trying to be safe,” Grace countered as she picked her knitting needles back up and softly clicked them together. “You’re trying to avoid the hard stuff. The lows are the things that make the highs so worth it, Lizbeth. You’re afraid of something else, and you’re blaming it on your mama.”
Unable to comprehend that, I frowned. What else could be more frightening than being like Mama?
“Romance books are fun, but the stakes are a lot lower when it’s someone else’s life.” Stella fiddled with a pearl necklace, her brow puckering. “I don’t blame some of your disillusionment, as sad as it is.”
“The books only cover a short period of time, too,” Leslie pointed out gently. Her gaze slammed right into mine. “They don’t show the long-term, difficult times. The boring times. The routine times. Your mama had it wrong in that she chased the giddiness of young love. But she missed the stability of sharing a life. There’s something very romantic in that.”
“You put too much on romance, Lizzy,” Stella said as she covered my hand with hers. “You always have, ever since you started this club at sixteen. The way romance happens in books isn’t always the way it happens in real life.”
“I’m learning that,” I whispered.
“Sounds like your mama never gave love a chance,” Grace said. “She chased romance. Maybe she was afraid of something too.”
I bit my thumbnail. What could have scared Mama? Aside from Jim in his drunken rages, or a life on the streets like she’d had after divorcing Bethany’s father.
“It’s the dark side of love,” Grace said. “There’s pain and loss. Sometimes there’s a slow dwindling of the thing that once meant so much. When there’s more to lose, it’s scary. But without the ups and downs? You’re not the same.”
“Yes, but it’s the downs that scare me,” I said. “It’s the downs when Mama was at her worst. The downs when Dad . . .”
My voice trailed off, thick in my throat. When Dad was out of control and we took the blame. Memories hovered just this side of consciousness now, and I had a feeling they were what I feared the most.
Stella squeezed my cold hand with a loving smile. “You aren’t your mama, Lizbeth. And JJ isn’t your dad.”
Tears filled my eyes. “I know.”
“But do you really?” she asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked in a harsh rasp. All of them stared at me. “I broke it off with JJ but only feel pain. I can’t think about anything else. I’m not sure I did the right thing. Why didn’t you tell me that it hurt this much? That it was different than in the books?”
“Why ruin it for you early?” Stella murmured. “You were bound to find out one day.”
“Such optimism,” Grace said. “You have always been a reminder of what we had, and what we could have again, if we were brave enough to try.”
“Well,” I whispered, hands in my lap, “now I know. And it’s absolutely devastating.”
Leslie leaned over and wrapped a warm arm around me. “You’re right. It is. But it’s not the end, even if it feels like it.”
For several moments, quiet hung over the table. Thankfully, Grace turned the conversation back to a snowstorm moving in later that night, and then to overused tropes in romance books. My phone vibrated against my thigh, pulling me out
