The Book Club

Chapter 5 — Everyone Has Something

Megan’s page arrived on Monday. She found it on her windshield, tucked under the wiper blade in the grocery store parking lot, which meant whoever left it had followed her, or waited for her, and the thought made her lock her car doors from the inside even though she was already inside.

*She had never graduated. Twenty years ago she failed statistics twice, ran out of money and nerve in the same semester, and simply stopped going — then spent two decades letting everyone assume the degree on her résumé was real. The founder. The educated one. The woman who started a reading group so she could finally be the person she’d pretended to be at twenty-two. Every book they finished was another brick in a wall between her and the truth.*

Megan sat in the driver’s seat for a long time, the page trembling in her hands, shoppers passing with their carts, the world going on as usual. It was all true. Every word.

She’d been twenty-two, broke, exhausted, working two jobs while failing statistics for the second time. She’d simply stopped going to classes one October — no dramatic dropout, no announcement, just a quiet evaporation. And then the lie had grown around her like a vine: the degree on her first résumé, the alumni networking events she’d dodged, the way she’d nodded along when people talked about their college years. Twenty years of nodding.

The book club had been her atonement and her alibi at once. If she ran a reading group — if she were the woman with opinions about narrative structure, the woman who’d read everything — then the degree didn’t matter. Nobody questioned the educated one. She’d built her entire adult identity on a foundation of air, and now someone had written it down in the voice of a thriller novelist and left it on her windshield.

She called the emergency meeting for that night. The four of them — everyone but Claire and Deborah — sat in her living room again, and Megan laid her page on the coffee table next to the others with hands that wouldn’t steady.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have told you before. About —” She gestured at the page. “It’s true. All of it. Paul doesn’t know. The kids don’t know. No one knows.”

“Megan,” Susan breathed, reaching for her hand. “Honey, nobody cares about a degree.”

“I care,” Megan said. “I’ve cared for twenty years. That’s the point, don’t you see? Whoever’s doing this doesn’t pick random things. They pick the thing you care about most. The thing you’d burn your life down to protect.”

The lie had started small, the way lies do. Megan’s first job out of her non-graduation had asked for education history, and she’d written the university name before she could stop herself — her hand moving with a confidence her heart didn’t feel. Then the second job, the PTA board form, the club website bio she’d written herself: Megan Hart, BA English. Each repetition poured concrete. By the time she founded the reading group, the degree was load-bearing — the credential that let her lead discussions, correct interpretations, be the authority. She’d read twice as much as anyone, she told herself, to earn what she hadn’t earned. The irony was exquisite and terrible: the woman who’d built a temple to books had never finished the degree that said she was allowed to love them. She’d confessed it to no one. Not Paul, who’d been so proud at her “graduation” party. Not her children. No one — until a stranger typed it up and left it on her windshield.

Janelle leaned forward, her nurse’s practicality surfacing through the fear. “So what do we do? Go to the police with — what? Anonymous literary criticism? ‘Officer, someone wrote my secrets in a serif font’?”

“We figure out who,” Megan said. “There are six of us. Five have pages.” She looked around the room. “Deborah never got one.”

She thought about the envelope on her windshield — the careful placement under the wiper, the deliberateness of it. Whoever had left it had stood in that parking lot, in the cold, and chosen her car. The intimacy of that terrified her more than the exposure. Someone had been close enough to touch her life and she had never felt it.

The silence that followed was heavy enough to feel.

“You don’t think —” Denise started, then stopped.

Megan never learned who had chosen the envelope over the mailbox — the small, deliberate cruelty of the wiper blade. It became one of the details she turned over in the quiet hours, like a stone in her pocket. Some questions, she was learning, had no answers. They only had weight.

“I don’t think anything yet,” Megan said quickly. “But it’s a fact. Five pages, five women. Deborah’s the only one without.”

“Or Deborah’s the only one whose secret isn’t worth writing about,” Susan said, aiming for lightness, but nobody laughed, because they were all thinking about Deborah’s stillness at that first meeting, and the way she’d said *prison would be a relief*, and the parking-lot warning — *be careful with her* — and none of them wanted to say what they were thinking.

“What about Claire?” Janelle asked. “She suggested the book. She shows up out of nowhere, and suddenly we’re all getting —” She gestured at the pages. “Has anyone actually verified anything about her?”

Megan thought about the text exchange — the three exclamation marks, the joke about fan mail. A little too breezy, in retrospect. A little too quick.

“I’ll look into it,” Megan said. “Discreetly.”

They made their pact tighter this time: nobody is alone with anyone until they knew. Watch everything. Trust no one outside this room.

Driving home that night, Susan called. “Megan? One more thing. I keep thinking about the style. It’s not just like the book. It’s like —” She hesitated. “It’s like the author is in the room with us. Like she’s been there all along.”

Megan hung up and sat in her dark driveway, Paul’s silhouette moving behind the lit windows. In the room with us. She thought about Claire Sutton’s green cardigan, her READ BANNED BOOKS tote, her theories about the anonymous author — theories a little too specific, a little too fond.

She thought about the way Claire had suggested this exact book, this exact month, to this exact group of women.

And for the first time, Megan wondered not who was writing the pages — but who had chosen the book in the first place.