‘Maybe she changed her mind because she’s not here,’ she said in a dismissive tone.

  ‘Could you at least tell her I came by?’ I searched in my bag for a business card.

  The woman took it and glanced over it disdainfully. ‘Writer for hire, huh,’ she said. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  At this point I wanted to stalk off, but if there was any chance she’d give the card to Maeve, I had to play along. I gave her the rundown of some work I’d done recently, leaving out the love letters. I could just imagine what her reaction would have been since she seemed so arrogant. I wondered if I should tell her about the Derek Streeter book, but I sensed that she would dismiss it as genre writing rather than serious literature.

  I mentioned writing pieces for funerals and wedding vows, along with biographical copy for websites. I knew some sort of dismissal was coming next and avoided it by making a move first. I thanked her and backed away from the open door. She wasted no time in shutting it without so much as a goodbye.

  I went down the stairs trying to shrug off the bad vibes I’d gotten from her. Before I’d come, I had considered various ways the meeting could go, but never considered that Maeve simply wouldn’t be there.

  All that nervous energy with nothing to show for it. What a waste.

  TWO

  I usually handled whatever came along pretty well, but I was definitely upset about being stood up for the appointment with Maeve. When I got home, I tossed my messenger bag on the chair and flopped on the couch. Rocky heard me come in and joined me on the black leather sofa. The big black-and-white cat looked up at me with what seemed like understanding eyes, and once again I was glad to have his company. It really was nice to have someone to come home to.

  But I still had a terrible feeling of loose ends. Yes, I knew it was cliché, but I didn’t care. What could have happened?

  I thought back to my dealing with Maeve. It had all been rather straightforward. She’d contacted me through my website and said she was looking for someone to help with a memoir. Then we’d arranged the time to meet. I had already checked the date and time and both were what we’d agreed on. I’d assumed she might be talking to others. The thought crossed my mind that she had already hired somebody else and simply not bothered to cancel our appointment. Or did she forget? I willed myself to get it together and reached for the plastic bag on the end of the couch that held a half-done crochet project. It was a combination of a hobby and self-soothing technique that always helped me focus.

  My mother had taught me how to work a hook and yarn when I was a kid and it felt like an inheritance from her. The time we’d spent together with our hooks and yarn had always been good moments. For a while I had made wearable articles like scarves and hand-warmers and even some blankets, but later I’d settled on making small squares. I used different stitches, motifs and yarns, with only the size staying standard. I liked them because the end was in sight when I began. And when I had enough, I put them together in a crazy quilt sort of mixture. The very first one I’d made hung over the couch I was slouched on. I’d gifted it to my father and he’d hung it in his office at the university. It was just the two of us then.

  What was I doing going over all these sad thoughts? I forced myself to sit up straight and made myself keep the hook working through the goldenrod-colored yarn. I glanced around the room which was a hybrid of when my parents had lived there and the changes I’d made since. The artwork that covered the walls was all from them, along with lots of the interesting do-dads like the opera masks hanging by the windows. I’d kept the wing chair adjacent to the couch, but the more modern chairs from IKEA were my addition. The patterned rugs in shades of reds and pink were left from my parents and added a warm feeling to the room.

  My surroundings and the crocheting began to work on me and I came up with a plan. There was no way to know if the person I’d dealt with would tell Maeve I’d been there, but on the chance she did, I’d give Maeve the rest of the day to contact me. If I heard nothing, I’d give it one shot and send her a message the next day.

  My hopes began to deflate when by seven there was still nothing. I was glad it was Tuesday and that the writing group would be there soon. It was easier to focus on their work instead of thinking about my own.

  Ed Grimaldi was the first to arrive. He worked in maintenance at the university and lived down the street. He had his usual impatient manner as he came in wearing track pants and carrying a mug holding an unknown beverage. He had never seemed to feel uncertain about the quality of his writing and had ploughed ahead with what could best be described as fan fiction for one of the TV shows that had one guy with a bunch of women for him to audition as a mate. Ed had taken it a step further and made the women all famous. No one ever said it, but we all thought the main character had an amazing resemblance to Ed. He was very explicit in the intimate scenes and the only person who could read Ed’s pages without a lot of embarrassed laughter was Ben Monroe who was a cop. He read all the hot stuff as if it was a police report.

  Ed had hooked up with a website and had been contributing his work to them. The success had given him an annoying sense of superiority and he was convinced he only needed our help for grammar polishing. But when I checked Ed’s expression this time, he seemed a little grim.

  He passed through the entrance foyer and went down the hall to the dining room on his own while I waited at the front to hit the button that unlocked the glass door downstairs. I’d always heard it referred to as the buzz door, probably because that was the noise it made when the button unlocking it was pushed, but the actual term was probably security door. I spent my days putting words together and was always thinking about the right word or phrases to use. I found it fascinating.

  There was no use going anywhere until the whole group arrived, so I hung by the intercom poised for the bell to ring again. As my gaze moved from the living room to the long hall and the doors that led off it, I could see why the design had been called a train car. It was hard to imagine that the building was over a hundred years old. Long ago the rental apartments had been turned into condominiums, which seemed like such a modern term to go with such an old building.

  It was still a mystery to me what the room I used as my office was originally meant to be. It had a set of frosted French doors that led to the living room and another set of the doors that opened to where I was standing.

  The doorbell rang and startled me out of my reverie. Rang was a poor description. It sounded more like a croak. There I was thinking about the right word again. I pressed the button to release the downstairs door.

  It was two-for-one this time. Tizzy Baxter and Daryl Sullivan came up together. Tizzy was in the lead and the kimono-style jacket she wore over her jeans fluttered as she waved her arms, showing off the file of papers she was carrying.

  Tizzy worked at the business school of the university and lived nearby. We’d become friends outside the group. She was a big supporter of mine and had done a lot to get me writing gigs. She seemed to know everything that was going on in the neighborhood, now and in the past. She was still tweaking her time-travel novel and kept finding out more about the history of Hyde Park.

  Daryl’s face was locked in a tense expression which was nothing new. It seemed at odds with her outfit, which was probably supposed to look funky and fun. She was the manager of a downtown store that catered to the barely twenty-somethings. The clothes were made to last about as long as the style stayed in fashion. I thought the odd mixture of patterns and prints was an assault on the eyes, and figured it was a sign the designers were really running out of ideas for something new to sell.

  Daryl’s expression had nothing to do with the outfit. It was all about going public with her pages. She reacted to even the slightest criticism, and if the group tried to placate her by saying it was coming along, she didn’t like that either. The result was that the rest of them said nothing and left me to do the dirty work. She was writing a romance novel and tended to have too many details of what the characters did. It was a fine line between making things come alive with detail and being too precise. I thought over the pages she’d left for me to go over from last week.

  Karen picked up the teacup with the flowers on the side and the gold trim, took a sip of the Darjeeling tea and then placed the two-thirds-full cup back in the saucer. She wiped a droplet of the amber liquid off the corner of her mouth before folding the delft blue napkin and replacing it in the lap of her dirndl skirt. She looked across the table as Marcus poked through the cucumber sandwiches on the tea tray and picked out one of the finger-shaped snacks. He examined the rectangle of white bread with a layer of cream cheese and cucumber slices so thin they were transparent before placing it on his plate. He took one of the salmon sandwiches next, stuffing it in his mouth instead of putting it on his plate. She noted with disgust that he chewed with his mouth open, sent pieces of the orange fish flying across the table and landing on the white damask tablecloth. Karen ignored his gross behavior and picked through the sweets. She rejected the tiny cup of trifle made with sponge cake and layers of whipped cream and fruit, and the square of white cake with boiled icing, choosing the miniature Napoleon slice made of flaky dough and rich yellow custard.

  I had been hard pressed to know what to write on her pages when I went over them. Honestly, I wanted to say that unless Marcus had a knife hidden in his hand and was waiting until he finished the tea sandwiches before stabbing Karen, the scene went nowhere. But I didn’t write that. I simply wrote that some dialogue with conflict might make the scene more exciting.

  ‘Where’s Ben?’ Tizzy asked when I followed the two women into my dining room.

  ‘He must be delayed at his sister’s,’ I said, reminding them that he always had dinner down there before the workshop. Ben Monroe was the other member of the group. He was a cop, and my downstairs neighbor Sara was his sister. She’d bought him the initial workshop meetings as a gift with two motives. She thought writing might be a better release for him than going out drinking with his cop buddies. And she hoped to play matchmaker and get us together. To further it, she’d come up with a plan to send up a plate of food for me with him. Under the guise of wanting to make sure she got her plate back, she asked him to wait while I ate. It was laughably transparent. Ben had been badly burned by a divorce barely a year ago. His wife had just left with no warning. What seemed to bother him the most is that he’d had no idea there was anything wrong. Personally, I suspected she had gone off with somebody else, but I wasn’t about to say anything.

  My divorce was ancient history in comparison. I’d been barely in my twenties and an idiot. I somehow thought that everything would be happily ever after once we got married. Ha! He’d felt trapped and had done everything he could to not come home, until one day he let me know he’d decided he needed his freedom permanently and would be picking up his things. I’d been left with doubts about my judgment.

  Sara’s wish hadn’t exactly happened. Taking things incredibly slow by today’s standards, Ben and I had gone from being friends to something more. But not too much more. We’d agreed to become each other’s plus one for any events either of us had, and we admitted that we liked spending time with each other. We’d tried to keep it under wraps, particularly from his sister. If she knew we were even almost dating, she would be pushing us to move faster than either of us was willing. I had done my best to keep our friendship from the rest of the writers’ group, with limited success. The only one who seemed upset was Ed, worried that Ben might be getting extra help with his writing.

  While we waited for Ben, the four of us started with our usual small talk. They liked to hear about the projects I was working on. I was glad to share if it was something public, like writing descriptions of menu items. I was considering whether to tell them about my non-meeting. There was no way to take it any other way than rejection. It was important they knew it was part of being a writer and that it even happened to me. But I rethought it and decided the focus was supposed to be on them and not on my problems. ‘Nothing much,’ I said in a noncommittal tone just as Ben walked in.

  Even though the group knew we saw each other outside of the workshops, I felt awkward about it and overcompensated by purposely staring down at the files in front of me instead of looking at him as he pulled out a chair.

  ‘Now that we’re all here, let’s get started,’ Ed said with his usual impatience.

  ‘Then why don’t you go first,’ I said. It was a replay of what happened every week, but to my surprise, Ed suggested Tizzy start.

  ‘You’re always in first position,’ Tizzy said, eyeing him with a hint of suspicion at the sudden change.

  Ed took a sip from his commuter mug and let out a dissatisfied grunt. ‘Can’t I be gracious. You know, ladies first for once,’ he said.

  ‘It’s out of character,’ Tizzy said. ‘If I wrote what just happened, you’d all jump on me and say it wasn’t believable.’

  Ed took another sip from the mug and kept his head bent as he gave us all a sideways glance. ‘There’s been a change in my situation,’ he began. ‘I’m not writing for the website anymore.’ He didn’t give any details, but I saw through it and realized he’d been let go and could probably offer the group a teaching moment on how to deal with rejection if he was honest about what happened. He ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper buzz cut a few times and blew out his breath. ‘We’ll just say we parted company. I was tired of writing that stuff anyway. Every week it was the same old, same old. I’ve decided to do what you people have been telling me to do.’ He looked around at us, apparently expecting nods of recognition, but all I remember the group saying was that he needed a little emotion in all that heavy breathing. ‘I decided to write a romance novel. The same guy will be in it, but instead of him picking someone from a pool of babes on a fantasy TV show, he’ll actually date the women.’ He held up a handful of pages and I noticed that his hand was shaking.

  ‘If it’s a romance novel, I can read his pages,’ Daryl said, reaching for them.

  ‘Remember this is something new and it’s just a rough draft,’ Ed said.

  Daryl read two pages and it went fine for a while. The main character was on a plane, flying to Alaska now that he’d gotten out of prison. No one would know about his past and he’d be able to make a new life working on the pipeline. But then suddenly the character was looking at a woman across the aisle and started imagining an encounter with her. All the euphemisms were there, the heaving breath and quickening thrust, the throbbing something. Daryl made it through with only a few nervous titters and then dropped the papers on the table. ‘I thought you said it was going to be different. That’s not romance.’

  ‘I looked it up and it is romance – erotic romance,’ Ed said.

  ‘OK, then next week, Ben should go back to reading Ed’s pages,’ Tizzy said. We all looked at Ben for an answer and he gave a distracted nod. We had an agreement not to pass judgment on the subject matter, just how it was written. Ed seemed relieved when Tizzy said it was actually an improvement over the website copy in that it seemed to have a plot.

  ‘Why don’t you go next,’ I said, giving a professional smile to Ben. He stayed in cop mode for the group and usually had an inscrutable expression. But there was a glare in his eyes that made him seem bothered by something.

  I was ready to chalk it up to worry about the pages he’d brought. Everyone got tense when their work was to be read and Ben had gone from writing about a terse detective to one who had real feelings. Writing it was hard enough, but then sharing it had to be even harder. He glanced up at the ceiling and shook his head. ‘I only have two pages – not enough worth reading.’ He started to get up. ‘I don’t even know why I came.’

  They all urged him to stay and he reluctantly sat down. I tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look my way. Something was clearly wrong.

  I tried to carry on with the workshop and did my best to concentrate on Tizzy and Daryl’s pages, but I kept glancing at Ben, wondering what was bothering him. It reinforced my feeling that it was wrong to get involved with someone in the group. My concern about him was distracting me from the others. I was glad that they always left their pages with me so I could go over them with my full attention and make comments.

  Ben left with them, which was nothing unusual. The plan was he came back with the plate of food. They probably knew, but we played the game anyway. I was anxious to find out what was up with him, hoping it was just something with his writing. Whatever it was, I was sure he’d tell me when it was just the two of us. I had just dropped off everyone’s pages in my office and was coming through the French doors when Ben came in the front door I’d left on the latch for him, carrying a plate covered in plastic.

  I expected him to hand me the plate and then go into the living room as he usually did, but he pushed the plate on me and turned back to go. ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ he said.

  He’d gone out and shut the door behind him before I could react.

  Had he just broken up with me?

  If I’d been at loose ends before, now I was comatose. It seemed like there should be a rule that only one really bad thing could happen in a day. Whatever hunger I’d had was gone and I was on automatic pilot as I took the plate back to the kitchen and put it in the refrigerator.

  The window in the kitchen looked out on the backyards of the houses on Maeve’s street. I came off automatic pilot long enough to be reminded that there had still been no text or message from her.

  I went back to the living room, desperate to pick up my crochet project while I tried to make sense of what had just happened with Ben.

  While my hook moved through the cheerful colored yarn, I thought back to the first workshop he’d come to. The others had done what they could to make him feel welcome and safe, but he’d sat rigidly with such a flat expression that I barely got a sense of his looks other than the short dark hair and dark brown eyes. It was only when I’d gotten to know him outside the group and he’d let his personality show through that I’d noticed his eyes had a soulful quality and his smile was a little crooked in an endearing way. He’d shown a sense of humor and a vulnerability. All of that had disappeared when he’d handed me the food. What could have happened?