The Book Haters' Book Club by Gretchen Anthony

Author:Gretchen Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2022-07-26T13:31:47+00:00

17

3 days until close...

Laney stared at her phone. She needed to call Tuck to update him on her return plans, having lied yesterday about the airline’s website being down, preventing her from rebooking.

“What’s going on?” he’d asked her. To which she’d replied, “Terrible thunderstorm here,” knowing that wasn’t even remotely close to what he’d wanted to know.

This morning, she got a text:

I checked the website. Working fine.

It was now past 7:00 p.m. and she still hadn’t been able to force herself to respond.

“Hey.” He answered on the first ring.

“Hi.”

Fat silence filled the line. They both knew a storm really was coming—a metaphorical one. They saw the clouds on the horizon and felt the dew point dropping. It was potent.

“What’s so terrible about our life together that you’d rather lie about being stuck there? You used to hate going home. Now you won’t leave?”

No one, especially Laney, would ever describe Tuck as particularly astute. He was not deep, his interest in the voices outside his own head about as thick as an orange peel, and yet he was right about this. Laney didn’t want to go home, and not him, or their marriage, or their life together was proving enough to draw her back.

She tried to explain. “It’s not so much about what’s there, as what’s not. My family’s going through a tough time. I’d feel irresponsible if I left before everything gets sorted out.”

Tuck asked what that meant, what it would take to sort it all, and how long. She didn’t know. Not because she couldn’t make a decent attempt to guess, but because everything was a big word, and because it felt powerful, and good and right to resist defining its boundaries.

Tuck hissed, “You’re a mess.” He meant it as an insult, to hurt her because he was hurting. Laney had always been the barrier between him and life’s messes, the one who prevented them when possible and cleaned them up when they happened. She wasn’t supposed to cause them.

“Actually.” She straightened and felt the infusion of whatever physiological strength came with it. “I don’t think I am. We’re a mess. Our relationship is a mess. But I’m not.” She looked out the window at the party across the street. “In fact, I might even go dancing tonight.”

Tuck understandably mistook this to be an admission of her staying in Minneapolis to continue with some illicit love affair, which he’d already begun to suspect her of having, and only quit accusing her of when Laney threatened to put her mom on the phone as a character witness. “I’m running to the bathroom every ten minutes, and I go to bed every night at nine o’clock. What sort of wild sex do you think I’m having?”

“Whatever,” he said finally. “Just come home, Laney.”

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