Chapter 13 Daisy
DAISY
The first Thursday is a disaster waiting to happen, and I spend the whole week pretending it isn't.
Nell catches me reorganizing the fiction section for the third time on Wednesday afternoon and gently suggests I might be "processing through alphabetization," which is annoyingly accurate and also none of her business.
Priya keeps texting me about what she should wear to the meeting like we're going to the Oscars instead of a bookstore back room.
Even Ruth calls (Ruth, who only uses her phone for emergencies and pictures of her grandkids) to ask if "that tall drink of water" is really coming to discuss romance novels in her presence.
"He's coming," I tell her. "He signed up. He agreed to the rules."
"Honey, I've been married five times, divorced three, and widowed twice, and I've never seen a man look at sticky notes the way your husband looked at that book."
"He's not my… we're getting divorced, Ruth." I pinch the bridge of my nose.
"Mmhmm. That's what I said about Harold the second time. Then he showed up at my pottery class with an apron and that stupid hopeful face, and nine months later I was pregnant with my third."
"That's not helpful."
"It's not supposed to be helpful. It's supposed to be true."
I hang up on her, which she'll forgive me for, and spend the next three hours trying to convince myself that one book club meeting isn't going to change anything.
Adam can sit in a chair and read sticky notes and prove whatever point he's trying to prove, and then he'll get bored and leave, and then I can go back to building my quiet little life without him taking up space in every corner of it.
This is a manageable situation. I am managing it.
Thursday, 7:00 PM
The back room is full.
It isn't just full. It's packed, bodies crammed onto folding chairs and perched on the edges of tables, new members clutching copies of this month's book.
Priya has set up her camera in the corner.
"Only the discussion," I tell her. "Ask before posting any clip of me.
" She nods and turns the lens toward the reading chair.
Adam has agreed to be filmed, but there's an energy in the air that feels less like a book discussion and more like a sporting event.
Adam sits in the corner.
The chair is too small for him (one of Nell's mismatched collection, a wooden thing that probably belonged to a schoolhouse in the 1950s) and he looks ridiculous in it, all broad shoulders and long legs crammed into a space meant for someone half his size.
He's wearing a sweater instead of a suit tonight, soft gray cashmere that probably costs more than my monthly rent, and his glasses are on, and his copy of the book, this month we're reading The Arrangement by Katherine Wells, is so thick with annotations that it barely closes.
Six colors of sticky notes again. Maybe more. I can see them from across the room.
"He really came," Bev whispers to Ruth, loud enough for everyone to hear. "I didn't think he'd really come."
"Shh," Ruth hisses back. "Let the man suffer in peace."
I clear my throat and everyone turns, which is normal, except that half of them immediately turn back to look at Adam, which is not.
"So. Welcome. For those of you who are new…
" I don't look at the corner, I don't, I don't. "We start with general impressions before we get into specific chapters. Who wants to go first?"
Priya leans forward in her chair, her copy of The Arrangement bristling with sticky notes. "Okay, but can we talk about how she just accepts it? He disappears for three weeks (no call, no explanation) and when he comes back she's just supposed to be fine?"
"She's not fine," Ruth says. "She's furious. That's the whole point of chapter eight."
"Being furious isn't the same as doing something about it." Priya flips to a marked page. "She says she's angry, but then she just... waits. She waits for him to explain, waits for him to apologize, waits for him to come to her—"
"What else is she supposed to do? Show up at his office and demand answers?"
"Yes! Exactly! Instead of sitting in that apartment wondering if he's ever coming back!"
Bev clears her throat. "I think the waiting is the point, though. Katherine Wells is showing how women are conditioned to be patient even when patience is destroying them."
"Then the book should be criticizing it, not romanticizing it." Priya turns to me. "Daisy, what do you think?"
I've been half-watching Adam in my peripheral vision. He's taking notes. Actual notes, in the margin of his book, his pen moving in quick, precise strokes.
"I think—" I drag my attention back to the conversation. "I think it's more complicated than that. Emma waits, but she's also using that time. She's figuring out what she wants, whether it's worth fighting for."
"But she doesn't know he's coming back," Priya argues. "She's just hoping. That's not a plan, that's denial."
"Sometimes hope is all you have."
Ruth snorts. "Hope and a bottle of wine, in Emma's case."
"The wine is medicinal," Bev says solemnly. "I highlighted that passage."
"You highlighted the wine passage?"
"I highlight all the wine passages. It's thematic."
I catch myself glancing at the corner again. Adam's underlined something, his brow furrowed in concentration. He looks like he's actually considering what Priya said. Like it matters to him. It tugs at my chest, watching him try.
"The real problem," Ruth says, "is that Henry doesn't understand what his absence does to her. He thinks because he has good reasons (work, family obligations, whatever) that she should understand. But understanding why someone hurts you doesn't make it hurt less."
"Exactly." Priya jabs her pen at the air. "He's so focused on his own guilt that he never asks what she actually needs."
"He asks in chapter twelve," Bev offers.
"Chapter twelve is too late! She's already decided he doesn't care. By the time he gets around to asking, she's built an entire wall—"
"Walls can come down."
"Not if he keeps handing her bricks!"
Adam writes something in his margin. I can't see what, but his pen moves deliberately, like he's choosing each word with care. I hate it.
I hate that he's good at this. It kills me that the room keeps sneaking glances at him like he's a celebrity, which, technically, he is, but not here, not in my space.
I hate that Ruth called him a tall drink of water because she wasn't wrong, and I hate that his sweater makes his shoulders look like a geometry problem I used to enjoy solving.
"Daisy?" Priya's voice cuts through my spiral. "You okay? You kind of zoned out there."
"I'm fine." I clear my throat. "Sorry. Where were we?"
"The confession scene. Chapter twenty-two." Priya's grinning in a way that suggests she knows exactly what she's doing. "We were going to discuss the hero's grand gesture."
"Right. Yes, the… the groveling."
"It's really good groveling," Bev offers. "Very sincere. Very specific."
"Very long," someone in the back adds. "Like, three pages of him just talking."
Ruth snorts. "That's the point, honey. Men like that never talk. When they finally open their mouths and something real comes out, it takes a while."
"Did everyone—" I swallow, try again. "Did everyone find it believable? The confession?"
Murmurs around the room. General nodding. A few people flip to the chapter in question, and I watch their faces soften as they reread the lines they've probably already memorized.
"It's the specificity that sells it," Priya says, camera still rolling. "He doesn't just say sorry. He names every single thing he did wrong, in order, and explains exactly why it was wrong. No excuses. No 'but I was trying to protect you.' Just... accountability."
"Daisy rated this scene five stars on her blog," someone says, one of the new people, a woman I don't recognize with pink hair and a tattoo of a book on her wrist. "She said it was the best scene in the book. The emotional core."
The room turns to look at Adam. Adam looks at me.
"We talked about asking him to read it," Priya says, then catches herself. "But it's your meeting, Daisy. Only if you want to hear it."
"It's fine," I hear myself say. "He can speak. For this. If he wants."
"The hero mistakes providing for loving, and by the time he learns the difference he's got no proof left that she should believe him," Adam says.
Adam sets his book down carefully on his knee. Adjusts his glasses. Finds the page (he doesn't need to search for it, I notice, he knows exactly where it is) and takes a breath.
"'I have spent the last six months telling myself that I gave you everything,'" he reads, and his voice is the same voice I've been dreaming about for five years, deep and certain, except now it's reading words that cut.
"'I paid the bills. I kept the lights on.
I made sure we never wanted for anything, and I told myself that was love, because that's what my father taught me love was.
A transaction. A ledger. A balance sheet where the numbers always come out even. '"
The room is absolutely silent.
"'But you never wanted my money, did you?
'" His thumb traces the edge of the page.
"'You wanted my time. You wanted my attention.
You wanted me to sit next to you on the couch and ask about your day and actually listen when you answered, and I gave you everything except that. I gave you everything except me.'"
Bev fans herself with a napkin. Ruth's lips are pressed together like she's trying not to cry. And Adam keeps reading.
"'So here's what I'm asking. Not for forgiveness.
I know I haven't earned that. Not for another chance, because I've had a thousand chances and I've wasted every one.
I'm asking for five minutes. Five minutes to tell you what I should have told you every day for the last three years, which is that you are the most extraordinary person I've ever known, and I have been too stupid and too scared and too goddamn broken to say it out loud. '"
I'm red to my ears. I grab a throw pillow from the couch behind me and hurl it at his head.
He catches it. One-handed, without looking, like he knew it was coming. And then he looks at me over the top of his reading glasses with those dark eyes, and his expression is almost amused.
"You wrote in your blog that this scene was the best in the book, love." The endearment hits like a sucker punch. "I'm just following the reading list."
"Don't call me that."
"Daisy, then." He lowers the book. "Sorry."
"Daisy is fine." The heat in my face takes longer to fade.
He nods and waits while I find my place. Across the circle, Nell nudges the tissue box toward Bev without making a production of it.
"You found the right chapter, at least," I say.
"You wrote about it. I remembered."
For a moment it sounds like an ordinary conversation between us. That is what stops me.
"We should wrap up." My voice comes out wrong, too flat, too controlled. "It's getting late."
The energy in the room shifts. People start gathering their things, murmuring to each other, casting looks between me and Adam that I refuse to interpret.
Priya shuts off her camera with an apologetic grimace.
Ruth squeezes my arm on her way out and doesn't say anything, which is worse than if she'd spoken.
By the time the chairs are stacked and the last stragglers have filtered toward the door, Priya brings me her phone. "The reading, cropped to him. Nothing personal afterward. May I post it?"
I watch the whole clip before I say yes. "The reading only. Keep me out of the caption."
By the time we finish clearing up, the clip is spreading beyond our regular followers.
"It'll be everywhere by morning," Priya says, and I wish knowing that made me feel less exposed.
The Parking Lot
The night air is cold enough to shock me back into my body. I stand by the back door, arms wrapped around myself, breathing in the smell of damp pavement and distant rain.
"Adam." I see him heading for his car and say his name before I decide whether I should.
He stops in the pool of light from the streetlamp, hands in his pockets, and waits.
"You can come over," I say. "For a minute."
He closes some of the distance. "Only if you want me to."
I say, "That was a good reading."
"Thank you."
"You meant it." It's not a question. "When you read it. You weren't just performing."
"No. I wasn't." He takes a step closer, not crowding me, just... present. "Daisy, I know I haven't earned the right to say this, but the last few weeks have been—"
"Don't."
"The silence you leave behind—"
"I said don't."
He stops. Waits. Patient in a way he never was before, and I hate that too, because it means he's capable of it, it means he always could have listened if he'd wanted to…
"'The silence you leave behind tells me everything about the home I refused to build.'" I recite the words flatly, watching his face. "Chapter twenty-four of The Arrangement. The hero's second confession, after the heroine comes back. You were about to quote it, weren't you?"
His jaw tightens. "Daisy—"
"I know this book, Adam. I wrote a four-thousand-word analysis of its themes.
I know every line you've highlighted, because I highlighted them first." My voice is steady now, finally, because this is familiar ground: being the one who notices, the one who pays attention, the one who knows more than he expects.
"You don't get to borrow someone else's words and pass them off as your own. "
"I wasn't trying to—"
"You were. You were going to say something romantic and rehearsed and hope I'd be too swept up to notice it wasn't yours." I take a breath. "I spent five years wanting your attention, Adam. Your attention. Not Katherine Wells's dialogue. Not some character's grand gesture. Yours."
He's quiet for a long moment. The streetlight catches the silver at his temples, the shadow under his eyes, the way his hands have curled into fists inside his pockets.
"Noted," he says finally.
And I'm furious (at the word, at the tone, at the way it sounds almost amused, like I've just taught him something useful instead of telling him to stop) but also, impossibly, against every instinct I have:
"Noted" made me smile.
I turn away before he can see it, taking the stairs two at a time, and I don't look back.