Page 30 of Count Your Lucky Stars
Margot had left a note on the whiteboard that readgame night, and Olivia had assumed she’d be home late, midnight at the earliest. It wasn’t even a quarter past ten.
“Everyone has an early morning, apparently. Everyoneexceptme.” Margot pressed the heel of her hand into her eye and sighed. “Sorry. Ignore me. Didn’t mean to rope you into joining my pity party.” Margot dropped her chin and laughed softly, staring at the floor. “Probably not the sort of party planning you had in mind, huh?”
Margot didn’t need to apologize, not to Olivia and certainly not for having feelings.
“Do you... want to talk about it?”
For a split second, it seemed like Margot might take Olivia up on her offer. She opened her mouth, then sighed and shook her head. “Nah. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?” Olivia prodded. “I’m happy to listen.”
Margot raked her fingers through her hair and offered Olivia a tired smile. “I’m sure. I’ll just sleep it off.” She squinted. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Olivia followed Margot’s bleary gaze to the coffee table. “Oh. I was just going through my boxes. Finally.”
Margot stepped closer, surveying the explosion of photos smudged with fingerprints, lucky pennies, and ticket stubs. Olivia’s corsage from junior prom, dried and brittle, rested atop a stack of notes scribbled in gel pen, once passed between her and Margot during class. The tassel to her graduation cap was knotted, tangled up with a macramé friendship bracelet. Margot’s hand hovered over the stack of folded notes before sheshifted, lifting a picture from the table with a smile. “I didn’t know you kept all this stuff.”
“Of course I did.” The idea of the alternative, getting rid of any of it, had never even crossed Olivia’s mind. She nodded at the bookshelves against the wall. “I noticed you had some spare shelf space out here, so I put a few of my books on the bottom shelf. I hope you don’t mind.”
She mostly read on her phone these days, but she had amassed a collection of paperbacks she couldn’t bring herself to part with, novels she loved so much she reread them, new releases from her favorite authors, and well-loved classics with cracked spines and yellowed pages that had come loose from their glue.
“’Course not.” Margot crossed the room and kneeled in front of the shelf, tilting her head and studying Olivia’s contribution. She brushed the spines with her fingers in a sort of delicate reverence that reminded Olivia of how Margot had once touched her. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“Brad didn’t like the books I read,” Olivia confessed, chewing on the edge of her thumbnail while Margot plucked a book off the shelf, skimming the back blurb before replacing it, repeating the process with another and another. “So I kept them under the bed.”
For years, she’d kept them stacked neatly out of sight because Brad hadn’t wanted them on the living room shelves, visible to visitors. He had made fun of them, deriding the covers, scoffing and calling them shallow, predictable, poorly written. On several, memorable occasions, he’d cracked them open, folding the covers back roughly, reading from them aloud, makingher blush. He would hunt for the sex scenes and laugh while he read, and too many times she’d laughed along with him, shrugging when he called them trashy, downplaying her interest. Brad had accused them of giving women unrealistic expectations. Eventually she’d gotten tired of his jokes that weren’t funny, of him glaring at her while she read, all his pointed huffs and none-too-subtle sighs. She’d tucked most under the bed, the rest split between the attic and her childhood bedroom, only reading them when he wasn’t around and sticking mostly to e-books so he couldn’t see what she was reading when he was.
Margot hugged the book she was holding to her chest and scowled. “Are you serious?”
Olivia drew her knees up and ducked her chin, feigning interest in the purple polish on her toes so Margot wouldn’t see her blush. “Unfortunately.”
She knew how it sounded, how it madehersound—pathetic. That this was Margot she was talking to only magnified her shame. Margot had always been so self-assured, so confident, sowhat you see is what you get, and if you don’t like it, tough. Olivia had wished she were like that, that she cared less about what people thought of her. She was trying, but it wasn’t easy, and with Brad, she’d never stood a chance, their relationship broken for so long there’d been no fixing it.
Giving in had been easier than pushing back, less exhausting than arguing. When she was in it, too close to see the forest for the trees, it was easy to convince herself thatgivingwas natural, that it was what made a marriage work, last. It took Brad asking for the one thing she wouldn’t give for her to realize her concessions didn’t count as compromises, not when shewas the only one ever giving. Brad never met her in the middle, never even came close.
Margot’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright, and her scowl furious. Her jaw ticked, her nostrils flaring delicately. “He didn’t deserve you, Liv.”
Olivia’s tongue felt thick in her mouth. Maybe not, maybe Brad hadn’t deserved her, but he’d wanted her for longer than a week, which was more than Olivia could say for Margot. “I don’t know if it’s aboutdeserving, but thank you.”
Margot turned the book over in her hands, scowl softening as she read the back. “Mind if I borrow this one?”
Olivia’s mouth popped open. “No. No, go for it. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” Margot traced the swooping letters that made up the title. “I saw someone talking about it online. I guess it’s getting adapted?”
The tension knotting her shoulders loosened. “I heard that, too.”
She should’ve known Margot wasn’t going to judge her for what she liked or ask her to tuck away parts of herself like Brad had. Just like she should’ve known Margot wouldn’t call her weak for putting up with Brad and his bullshit for too long.
She should’ve known she was safe with Margot.
Margot crawled across the carpet on her knees and set her borrowed book down on the edge of the coffee table before dragging one of Olivia’s half-unpacked boxes closer, two fingers tucked around the edge of the cardboard. She peeked inside. “You’ve got more books in here.”
Olivia’s heart crept inside her throat. “Those aren’t—”
Too late. Margot had already reached inside, plucking one of the books from the depths of the box, brows inching their way toward her hairline as she scanned the cover. “Hole-Hearted to Whole-Hearted: Moving On and Starting Over.”
Heat licked at the sides of Olivia’s face. “That’s not mine.”
