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Beth looks up from her annotated paperback and blinks once at me. “Interesting,” she says mildly. “We usually don’t invite men under active investigation into romance discussions.”

Diane snorts into her wine.

“I wasn’t aware I’d been formally banned.”

“You weren’t.” Beth snaps her book closed. “Though there was a vote.”

I am not sure whether she is joking, which is unsettling. Mrs. Reynolds peers at me over her reading glasses with resigned affection clouding her face.

“Oh, Jackson,” she huffs. “You look like a man who has managed to emotionally concuss himself.”

“Long day … or maybe week,” I respond, rubbing my hand over my face.

“Mm.” She passes me the cheese plate. “We were discussing whether Marcus deserves a second chance after chapter nineteen.”

I take a piece of cheese, always interested in their wild stories. “Does he?”

“That,” says Diane, sitting across from me, “depends entirely on what he does next. Actions. Not words. We have had enough of his flowery words … although I could use a few more of the dirty ones.”

Diane teaches fourth grade and has extremely firm opinions about fictional men. Opinions that are shared with the majority of these women. General agreement moves through the room as heat crawls up my neck, still not accustomed to these old horny bats.

“What did he do?” I ask, hoping the conversation doesn’t turn into a play-by-play of a sex scene.

“He had information she needed,” Mrs. Reynolds spits out with disgust, “and he used it for his own purposes. Then he stood there, in front of the Don and all their family, and watched her find out. Gah, the devastation I felt reading that! She then came back to his beloved car with a tire iron, smashing the blood red color like he smashed her heart.”

“So, she hates him now?” I eat my cheese, refusing to see any similarities in this month’s book-boyfriend fiasco.

“The thing is,” ponders Carol, who works at the bank with Mrs. Reynolds and always brings the good crackers, “she’s still angry. Which means she still cares. It’s the ones that go quiet; that’s when you know they are done.”

“Completely quiet? Like mute?” I ask, never knowing where one of these stories may go.

“If she stops talking to you entirely,” Diane clarifies with the gravity of delivering a medical prognosis, “that is when you panic. Anger is still a form of a relationship. Silence means she is done doing the work of feeling anything at all.”

I think about Phoenix in that conference room; the presentation and the photoshopped donkey. But mainly, the way she walked out without looking back at me. She is angry, understandably.

“Does Marcus figure it out?” I question, trying to not sound too invested. “What he needs to do?”

Mrs. Reynolds wistfully says, “Eventually, he stops with the excuses and starts with the changes. And the literal getting on his knees for her”—she blows out a breath, fanning herself ferociously—“that would get back in my good graces, that’s for sure.”

The rest of the group murmurs in agreement, expanding on the scene that apparently lasted three chapters.

Once they have fully relived his act of service in excruciating detail, Mrs. Reynolds tilts her head at me, eyeing me up and down.

“You know, you would make an excellent romance hero, Jackson. You have the bone structure for it and the guilt. I can see it now Love, Lies, and Litigation. It has second-chance best-seller written all over it. You can even do your own cover with that tortured look you have.”

“High praise.” I laugh with a shake of my head.

“It’s meant to be,” she replies, handing me a glass of paint thinner-smelling white wine. I take that as my acceptance.

As the night ends, I pick up the table in the center and carry it back to its original position when I hear a loud cat call from the back.

“Aye, aye! Warn an old woman before you bend over like that. I want to bring my phone out first.” Carol wolf whistles at me, trying to pull her phone out.

“Yeah, yeah, get your fill in, it will be a month until you see me again,” I say, giving them a shimmy for another round of cat calling.

As the room clears out, Beth approaches me. My apology to her is overdue, but somehow approaching her at the office didn’t feel right. Not when our relationship was forged here between discussions of emotional depth and favorite tropes.

“Beth, I, uh, need to apologize to you,” I start, not able to find my words.