Page 81 of How To Not Need You

Somewhere between the first stakeout and this second meeting, these people have stopped being Liv’s friends and started being something else.

Nobody asked my permission. Nobody checked if I was ready. Luca just collected me the way he seems to collect everyone, with the absolute certainty that I belonged here already and any resistance on my part was something he could simply out-wait.

Which is, I’m beginning to understand, exactly how the Rewrite Club works.

You don’t really join. One day you just realise you know where the mugs go, you’ve been assigned to Team Alpha against your will, and you’re spending your Friday night stacking chairs after an amateur surveillance meeting.

Apparently, that means you’re in.

I catch Liv’s eye across the room. She smiles at me.

I smile back.

Yeah. I’m okay with being in.

Ben walks past carrying three empty beer bottles.

“Team Alpha reconvenes Thursday. Don’t be late.”

“I have a shift Thursday.”

“Friday, then.”

“There is no Team Alpha.”

He pats my shoulder. “Denial, it’s the first stage before acceptance.”

He walks away before I can tell him that’s not how the stages of grief work.

Luca drops a chair behind me and swears.

Popcorn immediately repeats it.

Wren yells at both of them.

Liv laughs.

And I'm standing in the middle of Page & Grounds holding three chairs, somehow part of an amateur surveillance operation investigating a woman I've seen exactly once.

I should probably be concerned about how normal this feels.

I'm not.

Chapter

Fifteen

Liv

My kitchen drawer is a monument to single life. Takeaway menus for restaurants that have probably closed, rubber bands in varying stages of disintegration, three dead AA batteries I swear I’ll recycle next time I remember, a corkscrew I bought after my first night here, when I opened a bottle of wine by pushing the cork in with a chopstick and spent the evening fishing bits of it out of my glass, and somewhere beneath it all, a small blue tin I haven’t opened in years.

My laptop sits open on the counter, screen lit with a half-finished author branding project. The client wants “warm but professional” which is marketing speak for “I have no idea what I want, please read my mind.”

The tin is wedged beneath a stack of takeaway flyers that have yellowed at the edges. I pull it free and the lid comes off with a soft pop. Inside is a single recipe card. My mother’s handwriting, sloping diagonally toward the bottom corner like she ran out of room and refused to start over. It’s her old goulash recipe. The paper is creased down the middle from being folded too many times. One corner is stained dark, probably tomato, a mark from a kitchen twenty years ago that I’ve never tried to wash off. One of the few things that I still have of hers.

On the list of ingredients is sweet paprika. The quantity has been crossed out. Beside it, in the same handwriting but slightly darker ink, a higher number. My mother never measured anything. She seasoned by instinct, by the look of her own hands reaching into the jar, and apparently that instinct told her the original amount was inadequate. I run my thumb along the edge of the card. The paper has gone soft with age, worn smooth from all the times Mum handled it before it eventually ended up with me.

I haven't made this in years.