“I skimmed during lunch and read the rest while Harold had the boys in the backyard. I read fast when I’m motivated.” She holds up the paperback. “I have feelings.”
“Welcome to Bookaholics Anonymous,” Michelle says. “Feelings are the whole point.”
“Okay.” Lottie flips the book open. “The hero. Graham. The grumpy boat guy who grunts instead of communicating and fixes things at midnight because he can’t admit he cares.”
“What about him?” I ask, and my voice comes out higher than intended.
“He’s infuriating. He’sexactlythe kind of man who makes you want to shake him and kiss him at the same time. He does something so sweet in chapter fourteen—fixes her porch light without telling her—and then spends three chapters pretending it never happened.”
My hand tightens on my wine glass.
“The porch light scene was everything,” Michelle says. “He literally can’t sleep knowing her light is out. He can’t articulate why. He just shows up at two in the morning with a ladder and a bulb and does it.”
“Because hecares,” Mads says, shifting her pillow. “His love language is acts of service and denial. He cares so much it scares him, so he expresses it through home repair and then pretends he was just being practical.”
“It was a safety issue,” Lottie reads from the book. “That’s what Graham tells her when she finds out. ‘It was a safety issue.’ As if anyone believes that.”
The room goes quiet for one beat.
Every woman in this room knows about the running light. I know they know. They know I know they know. Grandma Hensley’s intelligence network does not have gaps.
“The sunshine character,” Hazel says, gracefully pivoting. “Marguerite. What did everyone think?”
“She’s lovely,” Jo says. “Warm without being naive. She sees through his grumpiness from the beginning. She knows it’s armor. She just waits.”
“I love that she doesn’t try to fix him,” Amber adds. “She doesn’t make it her project to crack him open. She just keeps being herself, keeps being warm, and lets him come to her on his own terms.”
“The almost-kiss in chapter sixteen,” Mads says. “On the beach.”
I take a very large sip of wine.
“They’re so close,” Mads continues, her hand on her belly, completely unaware—or completely aware and enjoying every second—of what she’s doing to me. “And then his phone rings and the moment breaks and he walks away. And she just stands there. And the line is —” She opens the book. “‘She watched him go and thought about how brave it was, coming back. How brave and terrifying and human, to walk toward someone when every instinct says to run.’”
The room is looking at me. Not obviously. Not directly. Just—looking. The way women look when they know something and are waiting for someone to confirm it.
“I think,” I say carefully, “that Graham needed more time. I think the almost-kiss was honest but the timing was wrong and he wasn’t ready to let himself have it.”
“But she was,” Lottie sayssoftly. This is her first book club meeting and she’s already going for the throat. “Marguerite was ready. She was standing right there.”
“Sometimes standing there is enough,” Jo says. “Sometimes that’s the bravest thing—not chasing someone down, not demanding they feel what you feel. Just being there. Letting them know the door is open.”
“The door and the porch light,” Michelle says, and everyone laughs, and the conversation moves on to the subplot about the heroine’s friendship with the local baker, and I sit on Lottie’s new couch with my wine and my feelings and the warm, overwhelming certainty that I have found my people.
Not just the book club. Not just the women in this room who showed up today with trucks and muffins and furniture and the casual, breathtaking generosity of a community that decided Lottie belongs before she even signed the lease.
All of it. The marina and the dock and the coffee shop and the town that fills a house without being asked. The kids on the beach and Harold in the backyard and Justin not-looking at Lottie and Paul carrying a bunk bed through my best friend’s front door with his sleeves rolled up.
This is what I came here for. This is what Aunt Dottie knew I’d find.
I look around the room—at Michelle pouring more wine, at Hazel making notes in her book, at Jo and Amber debating the hero’s emotional intelligence, at Mads eating her third piece of pie, at Lottie sitting cross-legged on her own couch in her own house in a town that decided she was theirs before she decided it herself.
“Thank you,” I say.
The room pauses.
“For what?” Michelle asks.
“For showing up today. Nobody asked you to come.”
