While the invitation had Will’s fingerprints all over it, she’d accepted gladly. No matter how self-satisfied she was over how she’d handled things with him, there was no sense in not giving herself something to think about.Something besides Will and what they’d done in his bed.The next day he’d sent her a charming, small bouquet of country flowers. It was a sweet, casual gesture that she took as the message she suspected he intended. They’d had a casual interlude. So it seemed smart to get her mind off Will and onto something else.Serendipitously—or not, since she was a voracious reader—she’d read the novel the book club members were discussing that night. But it turned out that she was in the minority, since several of the women, many of them young mothers, had been nursing various family members and themselves through the same flu that had flattened Emily. While that larger group commiserated about long waits in the pediatrician’s waiting room and the struggles of caring for sick husbands and ailing children when the nurse felt like death-warmed-over herself, a smaller group that included Emily carried on a discussion about the heroine of the book and her travails involving shoe shopping, a married, on-again, off-again boyfriend and the countdown of her biological clock.“Overextended credit cards, crummy love lives, that annoying tick-tock,”
