The Ex by Freida McFadden(3)

“I’m sorry,” he said again, unable to meet my eyes. “You… you can have the apartment.”

“I can’t afford the rent on my own,” I said. I loved my job and I was very good at it, but my salary was piddling compared with his.

“I’ll help you pay it then,” he offered. “Until you can find another place.”

He was so nice about it. That’s the thing about Joel—he’s a good guy. Always so kind and considerate and good. He had two months off after he graduated from medical school, and instead of using that time to have some fun like his buddies, he decided to fly to Senegal to volunteer at a medical clinic. I went with him and volunteered to help out doing what I could. We got our shots together—the yellow fever one made me particularly ill—and stocked up on malaria pills, and we spent six weeks living in a hut together. The room we shared was only slightly bigger than our walk-in closet, and the one tiny fan in the corner of the room did nothing to dissipate the stifling heat. After a week, I was covered head-to-toe in mosquito bites. But somehow, it was the happiest six weeks of my life.

“What if we went to Senegal again?” I suggested, clinging to the memory of when we used to be happy together. “We could volunteer again. Couldn’t we?”

He shook his head. “That… it wouldn’t…”

I was running out of ideas. I felt like I could convince him not to go if only I could come up with the right words.

“Please don’t do this,” I whispered. “Please.”

More begging. Ugh. I promise I’m not usually so pathetic.

I studied Joel’s face, with his pale eyelashes, thick brown hair, and the flush creeping up his neck. “Is there someone else?” I asked.

“No,” he said quickly. “There’s no one else.”

The subtext was obvious: Not yet. There would be someone else someday. Another woman. One he’d someday deem worthy of marriage, the house in the suburbs, the kids, the matching rocking chairs—everything I wasn’t good enough for. Because he and I didn’t work.

“Don’t do this to me,” I said, the volume of my voice rising above the din of the restaurant. Joel hated making a scene. He would do anything to avoid it. I was making him very uncomfortable now, although it was his own damn fault for doing this in a restaurant. Maybe he thought if he did it at home, I’d rip the whole place apart. I had no idea that as we were having this conversation, his buddy Pete was hauling his belongings out of the apartment so they wouldn’t be there when I got back.

Joel glanced around. Half the people in the restaurant had their eyes on us now. He looked really uncomfortable. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” he said for the third time. And then he stood up, tossed a few bills on the table, and sprinted out of the restaurant.

I was stunned. Fifteen minutes earlier, I had been planning a life with the man I loved. And now? Now it was all down the toilet.

They say there’s a thin line between love and hate. In those few seconds between when Joel stood up and when the door to the restaurant slammed behind him, my love for Joel Broder started to morph into hatred. It didn’t all happen that day, but with time, I grew to hate him. I hated that I wasn’t good enough for the life he imagined for himself. I hated the pity in his eyes when he offered to pay the rent on our apartment because he knew I couldn’t afford it. I came to despise the new girl he would meet who would someday take my place at the altar when he was finally ready to settle down. Much more than I ever hated Joel, I came to hate this nameless, faceless woman.

I wanted to get back at him for what he did to me.

And her.

That was my intention from the beginning. When Joel dumped me that night, he took away my entire life—my home, my friends, my dignity. I could never get any of that back. All I wanted was to even the score.

I never meant to kill anyone.

I swear.





Chapter 1: The New Girl


There are three businesses that nobody in their right minds would want to own in the twenty-first century:

1) A travel agency

2) A video store

3) A bookstore

Cassie Donovan has been booking trips online for her entire adult life, and she only vaguely remembers what it was like to walk into a store and borrow a DVD to watch on her family’s DVD player. She doesn’t even own a DVD player anymore.

Yet here she is, shelving her latest acquisition of slightly worn books at the used bookstore she inherited from her grandparents: Grandma Bea and Grandpa Marv. She was only twenty-two when she took over the store—just out of college. Nobody else in the Donovan clan had any interest in taking the reins of a used bookstore that was struggling in the setting of a growing online and electronic book sales market. But Cassie always had a passion for print and couldn’t let Bookland close its doors.

She pulls a dog-eared paperback out of the box. Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier—one of her favorites. Yet the classics never sell. She’ll be lucky to get a dollar for this one. A dollar isn’t enough to keep a business going.

“What’s going on back there, Cassie?”

The voice of Cassie’s friend and business partner Zoe Malloy floats out from the front of the store. Zoe was Cassie’s college roommate, and when Bookland fell into Cassie’s hands, she decided to offer a share in the business to Zoe in order to get her help. Cassie’s accounting degree helps her in balancing the books (or trying), but it’s Zoe who knows about sales. It’s a fact that when Zoe is at the front of the store, they sell more books than they do when Cassie is there. Maybe it’s Zoe’s glowing personality. Maybe it’s her sales technique or her degree in Communication. Whatever it is, Zoe is a better saleswoman than Cassie will ever be.