Page 24 of Better Luck Next Time

“Addy, this is all coming out wrong.”

“Actually,” she said in a deadly calm voice, “I think it’s coming out exactly right.” She turned in her seat and snatched up her purse from the floor. “I’ve got to go.” Then, as an afterthought, she snapped the laptop shut and cradled it to her chest as she stood.

“Please don’t go,” Georgie pleaded. “Let me help you.”

“You want to help me?” Adalia asked in the coldest voice she could muster. “Then leave me the hell alone.”

She left Georgie crying in her office, and she had to admit that she felt like a world-class bitch for that, but she knew what Adalia was like in self-preservation mode. They said a wolf would bite off its own foot if it were in a trap. Adalia was more the type to bite off someone else’s. She was leaving for Georgie’s benefit, not her own. If she hadn’t left, Defensive Adalia would have eviscerated her.

Only she didn’t know where to go, once she left. Her clunky car hadn’t started that morning, so she’d gone in with Jack. Of course, their house couldn’t be more than two miles away, which made it walkable, but she didn’t want to go there. Not yet. Instead, she shoved the laptop in her purse and just started walking. She found herself downtown, aimlessly walking in circles around the city blocks, letting the anger bleed out of her. There was an itch at the base of her head, a craving to go to Dottie’s garage, but she didn’t have a car, and she knew that what she created would only be destroyed. Then Georgie would have even more ammunition to call her crazy.

She didn’t call you crazy.

No, but Adalia had seen the fear and worry in her eyes.Maybe she didn’t say the words, but she’s thinking them all the same.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been walking, but it was long enough that her anger had burned off, leaving irritation and disappointment. Only she couldn’t figure out who she was disappointed in—Georgie? Finn? Herself?

Maybe Adalia should leave Asheville and go somewhere no one knew her. She could start over again, but doing what? She wasn’t exactly qualified for much. She dug out her phone and checked the job site app—no requests for an interview.

Perhaps if you actually applied for a job, you’d get an interview request.

She wanted to kick her inner voice in the shins.

But the question of whether she should move on wouldn’t leave her mind, so when a storefront across the street caught her eye—Psychic Readings by Lola—she stopped.

Didn’t Dottie have a friend named Lola?

She remembered the name, and it was such a Dottie thing to have a psychic friend. Was this the universe telling her that the answers to her questions could be hers if she simply walked across the street? Possibly she was just nuts, but she found herself jaywalking. A car came to a halt as she walked in its path, and she held up a finger of warning after the driver laid on the horn.

“Not today, Merv!” she shouted in warning, for some reason using Finn’s name from the ‘Who are you?’ game.

The older man snapped out of his momentary shock and shouted out the window, “It’s Herv, not Merv!”

Whatever. Finn would probably get a kick out of that. Plus the Fiona thing.

If she were speaking to him.

Adalia stopped in front of the door and read the hand-painted sign:Appointments encouraged, but walk-ins welcome. If you were meant to see me, I’ll have scheduled an appointment for you.

She snorted. “I bet.”

She’d never been to a psychic or had her palm read or sat down for a tarot reading. Some of her friends were into that kind of thing, but Adalia had always told them that she was in charge of her own future, not some woo-woo person with a deck of cards. It tickled Adalia to pretend Dottie’s waves of intuition were something more supernatural, but this was a bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense.

God, what was she even doing here? She was confused, for sure, feeling like she was standing at the center of a crossroads with a target on her back. Part of her wanted to put down roots in Asheville, but the rest of her was ready to run anywhere that would protect her from the humiliation of facing her sister, River, and most of all Finn.

But did she want to resort tothis? She had better ways to spend her money. Like her next student loan payment.

Yet she found herself unable to walk away. Neither could she get herself to enter. It was a harmless thing, she rationalized, and Dottie would be pleased she’d come to see her friend, yada-yada. What could it hurt?

Then again, what if she didn’t like what Lola told her? Therein lay the crux. That itch at the base of her neck pushing her to enter—it was the same feeling that kept sending her back to Dottie’s garage. But what if this visit to Lola could put a stop to that?

Did she actually want it to go away? If Adalia didn’t have art, then who was she?

Maybe it was time to find out.

Before she could change her mind, she opened the door and walked into a small waiting room filled with thrift-store chairs and a loveseat. A door on the back wall opened, and a young woman with brown, chin-length hair and bangs appeared. Adalia had expected someone much older. Lola looked like she couldn’t be more than a year or two older than her.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

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