Page 17

I’d done it.
The girls were gone.
My phone was silent, but even so, it was still screaming at me.
I left it on my bed and went to my closet.
Because yeah, keeping myself together had cost me.
And now it was time to pay the price.
Raye said I could start a business as a professional organizer, and since I loved doing it, maybe one day I would.
And that was what I saw in my closet.
Everything perfect and put in its place.
But for some reason, looking at it now, I wanted to mess it all up. Pull clothes from their hangers. Take shoes out of their plastic boxes with the Polaroid picture on the end and toss them in a jumble on the floor.
I didn’t do this.
I shifted some shoe boxes aside until I saw the row of books hidden behind them.
I didn’t know why I hid them.
Maybe it was because they were a reminder of what I didn’t have.
And after what happened with Javi, now, what I didn’t think I’d ever have.
Those books were the stories of the women who came before us.
We were the Avenging Angels.
They were the Rock Chicks.
Their men were the Hot Bunch.
The men in our circle where the Hottie Squad.
I knew Raye, Luna, Jessie, nor our newbies, Shanti and Willow had read them yet.
But I had.
I reached up and pulled down one of my favorites.
Rock Chick Regret.
I’d met Sadie, the real woman behind the heroine in that story.
She’d been broken. Utterly shattered.
Her man, Hector, hadn’t put her back together.
No.
He, with all the rest, had stayed close and stayed strong while she found her way to fix herself.
Along that journey, she’d pushed him away, though.