The Book Club

Chapter 3 — Page One

The page arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a coupon circular and the water bill. Susan found it when she got home from showing a four-bedroom colonial that smelled faintly of cat — a long day, a difficult client, the kind of Tuesday that made her grateful for the quiet of her own kitchen.

It was a single sheet of plain white printer paper. The text was centered, double-spaced, in a serif font. No greeting, no signature. Just this:

*She had known about the girlfriend for two years. She had found the receipts in his golf bag and done the math on the hotel charges, and she had chosen — every single morning, with her coffee going cold — to stay. Not for love. Love had left the house years ago, taking the good towels with it. She stayed for the money, and the money, she told herself on the bad nights, was a kind of love too. The kind that paid for the roof.*

Susan read it three times standing in her foyer, her purse sliding off her shoulder. Then she sat down on the bottom step of her staircase and read it a fourth time, because the fourth time she finally understood that this was not a passage from the book. This was not the book at all. This was her. The golf bag — Mark’s golf bag, the side pocket where he’d stuffed the restaurant receipts. The hotel charges on the Visa, the ones she’d found eighteen months ago and never mentioned. The coffee going cold on the kitchen counter while she did the math nobody was supposed to do.

Details she had never told a single living soul — not her sister in Dayton, not her therapist, certainly not her book club. She’d told herself the story so privately that it barely felt real: Mark’s girlfriend, a woman named Elise who worked in his insurance office, two years now, maybe more. Susan had done the ugly arithmetic every woman in her position does — the house, the retirement accounts, the twenty-six years of marriage, the alimony laws in Ohio — and chosen the roof. Chosen it every morning, with her coffee going cold.

Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold her phone.

“Megan,” she whispered, when Megan picked up. “I need you to come over. Right now. Don’t — don’t tell the others yet. Just come.”

Susan had found the first receipt by accident — tucked in the side pocket of Mark’s golf bag while looking for tees before a charity tournament. A restaurant in Dayton, two entrees, a bottle of wine, a Tuesday night when Mark had said he was working late. She’d told herself it was a client dinner. Then came the hotel charges, small and deniable, the kind of amounts a guilty man thinks no one will notice. She’d hired no detective, confronted no one. Instead she’d done the math — the house, the accounts, the twenty-six years — and made her choice in the quiet of her kitchen, the way she’d made every hard choice in her life: alone, with cold coffee. What shamed her wasn’t staying. It was that some mornings she felt relief — relief that the pressure of being loved was off, that the marriage could run on autopilot while she kept the roof.

Megan arrived in twenty minutes, still in her gardening clothes, dirt under her fingernails. Susan handed her the page without a word, and Megan read it standing in Susan’s foyer, her tote bag sliding off her shoulder.

“Who else knows about —” Megan started.

“No one,” Susan said. “No one, Megan. I swear to God, no one. Not even —” She stopped, her voice breaking. “Mark doesn’t even know I know. How does someone know this?”

Megan turned the paper over. Blank. She held it up to the light as if there might be a watermark, something, anything. There was nothing.

“It’s the style,” Megan said slowly. “Don’t you see it? The rhythm. The wryness. That line about the good towels — it’s written like the book. Like C. R. Black wrote it.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it? We just spent a whole meeting talking about that book. Someone in that room —” Megan stopped herself. She didn’t want to finish the sentence. Someone in that room knew Susan’s secret. Someone in that room had typed it up in the voice of a thriller novelist and mailed it to her house.

They sat in Susan’s kitchen for an hour. Susan cried, then got angry, then cried again. Megan made tea that neither of them drank. They went through the possibilities — a wrong address, a prank, someone who’d seen the credit card dispute filing from last year when Susan had challenged the hotel charges — but every theory collapsed under the weight of the specifics. The golf bag. The good towels. Whoever wrote that page hadn’t guessed. Whoever wrote it knew.

“We can’t tell the others,” Susan said finally. “If this gets out — Mark would — the divorce would —” Her voice cracked. “Twenty-six years, Megan. I’m fifty-eight years old. Please.”

Megan folded the page and put it in her bag. “We won’t tell anyone. Not yet. Let me think.”

But driving home, Megan couldn’t think about anything except the specificity of it. And underneath the fear, doing its quiet work, was a question she didn’t want to ask: if someone knew Susan’s secret — the thing Susan had never told anyone — what else did they know? About Denise? About Janelle? About Deborah?

About her?