Page 12 of Bad Luck Club

And because she didn’t think it would count as breaking the first two rules—after all, Bear had posted it on the internet—she told them about the ad that had brought her to the Cluster for the first time.

“I’m obviously all for trying this,” Adalia said, Maisie nodding in solidarity. “So how do we get him to go? Do we tell him we’re sending him to a spa day and—surprise!—it’s a support group meeting? Or maybe we can pretend it’s an errand for Buchanan Brewery. Like, we can have him bring a few six-packs over, and when he sees Blue”—she waggled her eyebrows up and down suggestively—“he’ll want to stay.”

“As much as I want both of those things to happen,” Maisie said, laughing a little, “I doubt he’d stick around.” A wicked look lit up her eyes. “Unless Blue wears one of her sexy shift dresses.”

“I’m sitting right here, guys,” Blue said. “And remember Dan?”

Based on the constipated look on Maisie’s face, it was obvious she was holding back theunfortunatelyshe wanted to slip into conversation.

Maisie didn’t like him. Adalia didn’t like him. And Bear, who’d never even met him, didn’t like him either.

That couldn’t be good, right?

But Dottie interrupted her musings. “If I’m judging correctly, we can’t fool him into going. It wouldn’t fit the spirit of the thing, would it, Blue?”

No, it wouldn’t. And even if she wore a thong bikini in the middle of the winter, she was sure it wouldn’t get Lee to stay if he didn’t want to. If he wasn’t ready.

She said as much.

“I think you seriously underestimate what you’ve got going on,” Maisie said, fanning herself with one hand.

“Be that as it may,” Dottie said, “I do believe we need to approach this a bit more strategically. But first, your cups.”

Maisie and Adalia passed over their cups, drained to the dregs, with a swiftness that suggested they’d done this many times before, and Blue took the last few sips of her tea before doing the same. Her heart hammered in her chest as Dottie prepared the leaves.

Her mother had believed in the power of such things. Tasseography. Tarot readings. Crystal healing.

Her father had thought it was part of her illness.

Blue, like always, fell somewhere in the middle.

Dottie clucked about the success she saw in Adalia’s cup and the luck she saw in Maisie’s. “Just as I expected, of course, but it’s lovely to see.”

Then she turned to Blue’s leaves.

She looked up with a frown that shook Blue to her core. When had she ever seen Dottie frown? The woman had always been the soul of optimism.

“I see an owl in your leaves.”

“What does that mean?” Adalia asked. From the looks she and Maisie were passing between them, they’d never seen her give a bad reading. At least not to someone she liked. Maisie and Adalia had told her with great gusto about the readings, plural, Dottie had done for Lee’s ex-girlfriend Victoria at Georgie’s bachelorette party.

Looking into Blue’s eyes, Dottie said, “An owl can hearken sickness, poverty, or deceit in love. It’s unlucky, my dear.”

She said it like a physician delivering news of inoperable cancer.

“Oh, well it must be about Dan, then,” Maisie said. Adalia snort-laughed.

Blue couldn’t react with such ease.Sickness. Poverty. Deceit in love.What if the owl wasn’t for her? Because those words did a good job of describing her mother’s situation.

But she forced a small smile and said, “Well, I guess there’s no question I belong in the club.”

Dottie gave her a pitying look, which might have been insulting coming from anyone else, and patted her hand.

“We’ll have to keep an eye on it, won’t we?”

Something told Blue she was going to be plied with endless cups of tea in the days to come.

“In the meantime, here’s what we’ll do about Lee…”

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