Nowhere Like Home by Sara Shepard

Author:Sara Shepard [Sara Shepard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Women, Thrillers, Psychological, Family Life, General
ISBN: 9780593186978
Google: q86_EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593186966
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Sadie had met Gillian at a party last year, after she’d broken up with Jordan and also after she’d had the terrifying experience on one of the canyon roads with the man that put her off dating, period. The party was thrown by someone she’d known as a resident in med school. Sadie hadn’t really wanted to go, but she didn’t have anything else to do that night, and it had been ages since she’d socialized.

She and Gillian happened to be at the snack table at the same time. Gillian caught her attention by looking around at everyone in the room and saying, in a very low voice, “What do you think the odds are that any of these men know where a woman’s clitoris is?”

“Pardon?” Sadie cried.

Gillian’s mouth twitched. Her cheeks flared. “Shit. Sorry. Sorry. Sometimes I just…say stuff.”

“No, wait!” Sadie said before she could scurry away. “You’re totally right. Guys strut around like they rule the world. But it’s like most of us are too afraid to tell them they’ve got it all wrong.”

Gillian’s smile was tentative, like she wasn’t sure if Sadie was joking. “Have you dated a lot of awful guys?” she asked.

“You could say that.”

She described Jordan—who, to be fair, wasn’t awful, just immature. Then Gillian—Sadie had to encourage her to talk, insisting that she was completely fine that a total stranger had come up to her talking about clitorises, and no, that wasn’t totally inappropriate—also spoke of a series of bad dates that had gone nowhere. “I blame my anxiety,” she said. “I swear the last decent boyfriend I had was when I was sixteen. He was a dream.”

“Oh yeah? Maybe you should call him up,” Sadie said.

But Gillian looked away. “Nah. He’s probably moved on.”

Then she backtracked and introduced herself, clunking herself on the forehead because that’s typically what people do first, right? She lived down the hall; she didn’t know the couple throwing the party particularly well, but she and the guy were at the mailboxes at the same time, and he’d invited her. She’d debated over coming. “Me, too,” Sadie admitted.

Gillian said she posted regularly on an Instagram account about her terrible dating life. “Well, technically, it’s more about my social anxiety—there’s a whole community of us out there—but there’s dating stuff in there, too.”

“Like social anxiety awareness, or something?” Sadie asked.

“And support,” Gillian said. “I have almost eleven thousand followers suffering with the same things I do. We’re there for each other. It’s a private group, though.”

“Can I join?” Sadie asked. Gillian said she could, but Sadie never got around to sending a friend request.

Still, once she let down her guard, Gillian was fun to talk to. Smart, and good at analyzing people at the party with her startlingly accurate observations. The woman over by the chips and dips clearly had a drinking problem, as she kept pouring vodka into a water bottle when her husband wasn’t near. Sadie knew this to be true: The husband, another man she’d gone to med school with, had expressed worry himself.

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