Chapter 12 Daisy
DAISY
The coffee isn't even hot yet when Nell drops it on me.
"So," she says, setting down her toast, "Adam came in yesterday. He asked to join the book club. I told him he could try one meeting, but I should have asked you first."
I freeze with my mug halfway to my mouth. "I'm sorry, what?"
"I can tell him no," Nell says. "This is your refuge too. He signed up and posted a review last night, but neither of those buys him a seat."
"A review." I set the mug down because my hands have forgotten how to hold objects. "Adam posted a book review. On the internet. About a romance novel."
"Mmhmm."
"Adam, who thinks fiction is what happens when facts get lazy. Adam, who once asked me why anyone would read about fake people when there are quarterly reports to analyze."
"He knows it's your decision." Nell turns her phone toward me. "Priya sent me this at two in the morning. The review has gone viral."
My phone buzzes against the counter. Then again. Then it doesn't stop.
I grab it and there's Priya's name, a screenful of messages, starting with DAISY WAKE UP and ending with a link and a wall of exclamation points. I tap through to Instagram and there it is: an account called husband_reads, one post, six hours old.
Half a million likes.
The profile picture is a close-up of a book spine, his face nowhere in sight, but the bio reads: Learning to read what matters. Starting with the books she loves. But he used his full name beneath it, and a business reporter shared the post with her audience. The review itself:
My brain refuses to process the words.
Just finished The Arrangement by Katherine Wells.
My wife recommended this years ago. I never picked it up.
I should have. The pacing in the middle section drags, chapters 14-18 feel like the author marking time before the conflict she actually wants to write, but the heroine's arc hit harder than I expected.
She spends the whole book convincing herself that what she's been given is enough, that she should be grateful for crumbs from a man who thinks showing up with solutions is the same as showing up with attention.
By the time she walks away, you understand exactly why she had to, even though he never technically did anything wrong.
That's the cruelest kind of failure. The one you can't even be angry about properly.
My wife would disagree about the pacing. She loved the middle section. She said it was where you learned who the heroine really was, before she had to be brave.
She was right. I should've read it years ago.
I put the phone down.
"Daisy?" Nell's watching me carefully now. "You okay?"
"He called me his wife."
"You are his wife. Legally. Filing papers and ending a marriage are different things."
"He's never—" I stop, start again. "He doesn't do things like this. He doesn't read. He doesn't post things online. He definitely doesn't admit he was wrong to half a million strangers on the internet."
"Most of those people found it after a reporter shared it," Nell says. "He still chose to put your marriage in a public post."
I'm already moving, grabbing my cardigan off the back of the chair, shoving my feet into the sneakers by the door.
"Daisy." Nell catches my arm. "Do you want me to go with you?"
"No." Yes. "No, I need to… I have to tell him no myself. This isn't… he can't just decide to join my book club. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works."
"Okay." She lets go. "And I'll back your decision. I should have waited for it yesterday."
"Good," I say, and I mean it, and I hate that I mean it.
The stairs down to The Margin creak in all the familiar places.
He's there between Historical and Contemporary, six-foot-five of tailored suit and exhausted eyes, holding a paperback like he's not sure which end is up. The Arrangement, I realize. The same book from his review. And it's covered in sticky notes.
Six colors. Maybe seven. Tabs sticking out from every angle, the spine creased in a way that says he didn't just read it, he lived in it, and when he looks up and sees me his whole face opens in a way I've never seen, hope and terror at once, and it shouldn't make my chest hurt but does.
"Daisy." My name sounds different in his voice now. Rougher. Like he's been saying it too much to an empty room.
"What are you doing here?"
"I joined the book club."
"I saw. Half a million people saw."
"I know." He shifts his weight, and it's wrong (Adam doesn't fidget, Adam doesn't look uncertain, Adam takes up space like it owes him rent) but right now he looks like a bear who wandered into a gift shop and can't find the exit. "I should have asked. Before I posted. I didn't think—"
"You never think." The words come out sharper than I intended, but I don't take them back. "You never think about how your choices affect anyone else. You just decide what you want and then you're confused when the rest of us don't fall in line."
"That's fair."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Agree with me. It's infuriating."
A muscle twitches at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile. "Would you prefer I argue?"
"I'd prefer you weren't here." I gesture at the shelves around us, the soft morning light through Nell's front windows, the life I've been building in the wreckage of the one he helped destroy.
"This is mine. The store, the club, these books: this is the thing I had that didn't have anything to do with you, and now you're standing in the middle of it with your little sticky notes like you've earned the right to be here. "
"I haven't earned anything." He says it quietly, and god, I hate that he looks sincere.
I hate that the dark circles under his eyes make me want to ask when he last slept.
I hate that his wedding ring is still on his finger when mine is in a box somewhere in his house, left on the hall table like a goodbye note I couldn't make myself write.
"I know that. I'm not here because I think I deserve to be.
I'm here because you said, in your blog, you said—"
"Don't."
"Rule one. A hero shows up." He holds up the book, bristling with its rainbow of sticky notes.
"Page two hundred and forty-three. The heroine's monologue about what she actually needed, all along.
'I didn't want him to save me. I wanted him to see me.
I wanted him to show up at the places I'd already saved myself and say he was proud of me for doing it. '"
The words hit somewhere soft and unprotected.
"You've never picked up a romance novel on your own," I say, but my voice comes out wrong. Too quiet.
"I've read four in the last two weeks." He flips to a page near the back, finds a hot pink tab.
"The Arrangement. Then the prequel. Then the two you mentioned in your review of chapter eighteen, the ones you said explored similar themes with different outcomes.
Katherine Wells uses parallel structure in her—"
"Stop."
"… dialogue to show—"
"Adam. Stop."
He stops. Now he's put more effort into one paperback than he put into our marriage.
"You can't buy your way back in," I tell him. "Not with money, not with grand gestures, not with… with book reviews that make you look sensitive and reformed. I don't care how many strangers on the internet think you're romantic."
"I know."
"You don't get to show up here and—"
"Daisy." He cuts me off, and his voice goes raw now.
"I'm not trying to buy anything. I'm trying to learn.
You spent five years telling me what mattered to you, and I spent five years nodding and not listening, and now I'm listening.
That's all. I know it's too late. I know reading the books doesn't undo the damage.
But you asked me once if I even knew what you loved, and I couldn't answer, and I'm never going to be that man again.
Even if you never speak to me after the divorce is final.
Even if this is the last conversation we ever have. I'm going to know the answer."
I don't have a response for that. I'm not sure there is one.
"Fine," I hear myself say. "You want to join the club? Fine. But there are rules."
He straightens slightly. "Name them."
"You don't speak for the first week. You sit, you listen, you observe. You don't make it about yourself."
"Okay." No argument, no negotiation, which unbalances me.
"You don't come to me. You don't seek me out. If we end up in the same room, you wait for me to acknowledge you."
"Okay."
"And you don't pay for anything. Not books for the club, not snacks, not a new sign for the front window. Nell isn't a charity case and neither is this club. You show up like everyone else or you don't show up at all."
"Okay." He says it simply, like I'm not laying down terms of surrender. "Anything else?"
"I'm sure I'll think of something."
"I'll be ready."
The bell over the door chimes, and Chaucer appears from somewhere in the back, gray and imperious, the store's unofficial mascot and my occasional roommate.
He stalks across the counter with the particular disdain he reserves for anyone who isn't Nell, spots Adam's suit jacket laid carefully over a display, and without ceremony, lifts his tail and pees directly on it.
The silence that follows is profound. Adam stares at the jacket. Then at the cat. Then at me.
"I think," he says slowly, "your cat has an opinion about the new member."
"He's not my cat. He's Nell's cat. And clearly he has excellent judgment."
I don't laugh. I absolutely don't laugh. But my chest loosens, just a little, as Adam sighs and picks up the ruined jacket with two fingers like it might bite him.
The bell chimes again, and Kendra walks in for her shift, Kendra with her perfect ponytail and her designer bag, fitting in volunteer hours between shifts at Meridian. She stops three steps inside the door, and her eyes go wide.
"Oh!" The recognition is instant. She's been coming here for five years, but the anniversary party was when she finally connected my husband to the man from the business magazines.
Now she knows exactly who has joined the club.
Her smile spreads slow and bright, and she sets her bag down like she's already making herself comfortable. "Are you staying? That's great."