Page 16 of The Emma Special

Yep. Trash. No matter what she did, she’d always be the peasant who didn’t belong with anyone above her assigned station.

She hardly remembered his face, but the taunt had rooted deeply. Plucking leaves from the weed hadn’t eradicated the hurt no matter how much she worked to make up for it.

“We should have a ceremonial burning of that one.” Emma looked around at her friends who all nodded in agreement.

“So, what did everyone think about this week’s chapters?” Allison asked, giving everyone a safe segue from the book that held way too many secrets.

Katie pulled out the current book club diary and turned to an empty page. “I liked it. The arranged marriages of the regency era have nothing on the frontier. Forced to marry a duke and have servants make my food? Sign me up. In all of those stories, the women hardly had a choice–besides running away, I suppose. But in this one, she’s on her own. Marty is nineteen, pregnant, husband dead, no money, and no way to get back east. Clark is in a similar boat with the kid and a farm and no way to manage them both by himself.”

“I don’t think I would have done it,” Allison said.

Katie made a note in the book. “No, I don’t think you would have. You would have had three contingency plans in place already. Emma? What do you think?”

“It’s romantic.”

“Not when it started,” Summer interrupted. “Sorry, please explain. What’s romantic about grieving one husband while keeping house for a new one the same week?”

“I get it. That was awful,” Emma mused. “I really felt for Marty. I meant it was overall romantic in the way Clark treated Marty. His patience, kindness. He never got angry at her when she was a terrible housewife. How he gave her the space to grieve, and then we find out he’s still processing his wife’s death. But for real, can we talk about the garden scene?”

“Oooh, please. Now that was romantic.” Katie drew a row of little hearts around the words, garden scene.

Emma sat back and half-listened as her friends threw opinions around the coffee shop of an arranged marriage versus a marriage of convenience. She’d read the chapters, but her mind had been elsewhere. It was her fourth day at Anderson and Associates, and she lived in a constant state of hyper-awareness and carried around an uncomfortable fear of messing up.

“Emma, you okay?” Katie asked.

Blinking back the daze she’d sunk into, she shifted on the couch to tuck her feet beside her. “Yeah. Just tired. Feels like I’m learning ten new things every day at work.”

Summer turned and propped an arm on the back of the couch. “Would you trade it to keep house for Clark?”

Emma chuckled, “You bet your sweet bippy I would.”

The chorus of “Don’t Stop Believing” drifted from her purse, and she reached for her phone. Her heart squeezed when she saw the word Mom on the screen.

“Don’t answer that,” Summer said.

“She can answer it if she wants to,” Katie said, always softening Summer’s direct orders.

“Don’t answer it if you don’t want to,” Summer amended. “Though, I don’t know why anyone would want to talk to Cruella DeVille.”

“Last I checked, Janey doesn’t harm puppies,” Allison said.

Emma dropped the phone back into her purse, but an invisible pressure tightened around her neck. She should answer her mother’s calls, but every interaction with Janey stung. At least they didn’t talk often. Emma couldn’t handle much more than their sporadic phone calls.

“She knows this is when we meet for book club. She does this on purpose,” Summer pointed out.

“But we get along great if we’re not in the same room.”

“Spare me,” Summer said. “Is it really love if you have to love from afar so you can’t maim each other?”

“Facts,” Allison stated. “Emma, answer it or don’t. We support you either way.”

Emma chewed her bottom lip until her purse stopped ringing.

“Okay!” Katie clicked the end of her pen. “So my next question is about the Ma Graham character. If Marty⁠—”

Emma’s purse began singing again, and a collective groan passed through the girls. “All right. Y’all carry on without me.”

She accepted the call as she stepped onto the sidewalk outside the brick building. “Hello.”