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The Book Club
When a charming newcomer suggests a thriller about a woman who murders her husband and gets away with it, the Willow Creek Reading Group is hooked — until typed pages start arriving in their mailboxes, exposing each woman's darkest secret in the novel's exact style. Someone in the circle has been listening for twelve years. And the woman with the most to hide never received a page at all.
Chapter 4 — The Game
Denise found hers on Thursday morning, paper-clipped to the PTA newsletter in her mailbox. She read it standing at the end of her driveway in her bathrobe, and by the time she got back inside, her face was the color of old paper.
Janelle found hers Friday, slipped under her front door like a ransom note. She called Megan from the hospital parking lot between shifts, her voice stripped down to something raw.
By Saturday afternoon, all three women had called, and Megan had done the thing she always did in a crisis: she opened her home.
They sat in her living room with the pages spread on the coffee table like evidence. Three sheets. Same paper, same font, same double-spacing. Same voice — that cool, wry, merciless voice from The Perfect Murder.
Denise’s page described the charity gala in April: the donation totals she’d inflated by nearly thirty thousand dollars to secure the Volunteer of the Year award, the forged pledge cards, the way she’d stood on that stage with the crystal plaque and felt like a fraud in a good dress. *She told herself it was for the school,* the page read. *The money still went to the school. It wasn’t stealing, exactly. It was — editing.*
“I never told anyone,” Denise whispered. “The real numbers — only I saw the real numbers. I told myself it was for the school, for the kids, but it was for me. It was always for me. The plaque is on my mantel, Megan. My daughter dusts it.”
Janelle’s page went back eleven years, to her second year as a nurse: the medication error on the night shift, the elderly patient who coded at 4 a.m., the chart she’d quietly corrected before anyone saw. *She told herself it was a kindness,* the page read, *to everyone. To the family, who got to believe it was peaceful. To herself, most of all. She had been twenty-seven years old, and she had buried it so deep she almost convinced herself it didn’t happen.*
Denise’s gala had been the social event of the spring — three hundred guests, a silent auction, a local news crew. She’d chaired the committee for four months, living on coffee and spreadsheets, and when the final donations came in short of the previous year’s total, something in her had snapped. Not greed — she’d never taken a dollar. Vanity. She’d wanted the headline number, the applause, the plaque. So she’d inflated the pledges, just on paper, just enough to beat last year. No one checked; no one ever checked. The crystal award sat on her mantel, and every time her daughter dusted it, Denise felt the lie like a toothache. Janelle’s secret was older and heavier. She’d been twenty-seven, working nights, drowning. The old man in 4B had coded at 4 a.m., and she’d realized at 5 that she’d hung the wrong bag at midnight. She’d fixed the chart before the sun came up and never told anyone — not the family, who grieved a peaceful death, not her husband, not God. She’d told herself it changed nothing. She’d been telling herself for eleven years.
“I never told anyone,” Janelle said. Her voice was flat, clinical — the voice she used for bad news in the ER. “Not my husband. Not a priest. Eleven years, Megan. Who listens for eleven years?”
Susan’s page lay beside them — the girlfriend, the golf bag, the good towels. Three secrets. Three women. Three pages in the same merciless voice.
“Has anyone else gotten one?” Megan asked. “Deborah? Claire?”
They shook their heads. Megan had already texted both that morning, casual, fishing. Deborah hadn’t replied — unusual, but Deborah was sometimes slow with texts. Claire had replied with three exclamation marks and a joke about fan mail.
“Okay,” Megan said. “Okay. Let’s think about this like — like the book. Someone in our circle knows things they shouldn’t know. Someone is writing these in the style of the novel. It’s targeted, it’s personal, and it’s —” She searched for the word. “It’s intimate. Whoever this is has been listening for a long time.”
“That’s what scares me,” Janelle whispered. “Eleven years, Megan. Eleven years of Thursday nights. Who does that? Who sits in a circle with you for a decade, just — collecting?”
They made a pact before they left: no one tells the husbands, no one tells Deborah or Claire yet, no one does anything sudden. They would watch, and wait, and at the next meeting they would pay attention to everything — every glance, every pause, every question that lingered a beat too long.
After they left, Megan stood at her window and watched their cars pull away one by one down the quiet street. Then she went to her mailbox — she hadn’t checked it since Wednesday — and flipped through the stack with her heart hammering against her ribs.
Coupons. A catalog. The water bill.
Nothing. No page for Megan.
She told herself she was relieved. She stood at the end of her driveway in the cold November air and told herself she was relieved, and she almost believed it.