Girl Next Door by Rachel Meredith

Author:Rachel Meredith [Meredith, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

21

MC hung around the house until Saturday night, hoping Nora might’ve been bluffing about not speaking to each other ever again. But her texts went unanswered. And Gabby and Conrad were too distracted by their own problems to pay MC much mind.

Right back to where they’d all started.

That night she took a train back to the city, staring out windows, waiting on platforms. Back at her apartment, neither a Rebecca Sloane novel nor a Matrix rewatch was enough to spare her from the heavy mood that’d followed her back to the place she’d thought she belonged. Joe wasn’t expecting her in Brooklyn until the next day, but she almost texted him about getting some dumplings, or a beer, or even just taking a walk along the frigid sidewalks as drunken couples spilled out of foggy-windowed bars. She kept pulling out her phone, then putting it away again. She wasn’t in the mood to be seen.

She took a shower and let herself get a little weepy.

Grow up, MC.

Why couldn’t she seem to do that?

Sunday morning, bleary-eyed but feeling a little less dire, she used the one weapon she had against Joe descending on her apartment demanding she rehash every moment of her Thanksgiving: She told him she needed to write. It was just an excuse, at first. She planned to take another crying shower, go out for Chinese, and chip away at a batch of marketing emails for some startup that claimed to have created a software that would allow local governments to mobilize Big Data to solve climate change. But when she settled in at Yang Garden II with her laptop and some wonton soup, she opened the notes document she’d sent to Joe for the A-team meeting instead and read it from start to finish.

They weren’t half bad, her little observations of Nora’s character, the way she was and wasn’t like Nicole Penny. No simple heart of gold, but an unexpected warmth under the prickly conversation. An empathy that came from seeing people clearly, rather than a sentimental sappiness. But the focus on Nora, she realized now, was unfair.

To both of them.

Because this wasn’t just Nora’s story, and never had been.

She inhaled her soup, jotted a few additional notes, then headed home to finish the marketing emails.

On Monday, she walked up the stairs to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at nine in the morning and shuffled in with the waiting crowd.

Past the Art Deco fortress exterior, on the other side of the tall, gold-embossed gates overlooking Grand Army Plaza, was the usual overheated, vaguely burnt smell of all public libraries in winter. The sun shone through the tall glass windows in the study wings, shafts of illuminated dust teeming over the long tables. She settled in by the religious books, where the people who were not of entirely sound mind were at least dependably quiet, lost in the study of various apocalypses. On her way in, she’d taken a stroll through the fiction section, finding a well-worn copy of Girl Next Door face out on the shelves.

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