“What?” Jen said.
“Your car mirror is gone.”
She looked up from searching for keys in her bag. He was right. The driver’s side-view mirror was completely gone—two wires reached futilely into the air.
Jen was momentarily breathless. “Who would do this?” she said.
“The vandal.” Abe’s tone was matter-of-fact.
“But the vandal’s never done anything this severe,” Jen objected.
All of these months, Jen had been the one talking down the women of the book club. It’s not personal. It’s property damage.
（Because you thought it might be your son.）
It felt very personal now, though, like she was being punished for something specific.
“Maybe the vandal was mad at you,” Abe said. He took a casual bite of peanut butter toast.
Jen peeled her gaze from her poor car, naked and violated, and fixed it on Abe.
“You think the vandal targeted me?”
“How would I know?” Abe shrugged and took another bite.
“Abe, did you do it?” She’d breathed out the question. “It’s okay if you did. Just tell me.”
“You think I’d smash your car?” His eyes had widened, betrayed.
“No,” Jen said quickly. “But I’m sorry for making you go last night. I shouldn’t have pushed.”
“That’s true,” Abe agreed. “But it was actually okay. We talked to a girl who was out running.”
“Who was that?”
“The one who puked all over Colin at Fall Fest.”
“Laurel Perley?”
“We all played this game, horse. Is your car okay to drive?” He looked at Jen’s car. “You really should have parked in the garage.”
There was a tiny white ball in the part of Abe’s hair. Jen plucked it out. They would be finding them forever.
“It’s not okay to ruin things,” she said. “We have to tell Dr. Shapiro about last night.”
Abe shrugged, checked his watch. “Did Dad leave his car here or at the airport?”
“Here. Does Laurel Perley run alone at night a lot?”
“I don’t know. Can we take Dad’s car? I don’t want to be late.”
“Sure,” Jen said.
She thought of Laurel’s messy performance at Fall Fest. She had a rebellious streak. How late was she out running every night?
Not too much of a stretch, Jen speculated, from that to vandalism.
Hey, wake up, Scofield, she thought, it looks like we have another suspect.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“The police don’t care at all,” Janine said. “They really don’t.”
“It’s all been pretty minor.” Deb cast a regretful look at Jen. “With the exception of what happened to your car.”
“I just read an article about how hate crimes are on the rise,” Janine said worriedly. “Is anyone else connecting the dots between this month’s book and what’s happening here?”
“Janine, you can’t compare a popped snowman to genocide.”
“Violence is violence. It starts with broken store windows and curfews and escalates rapidly to something much worse. We need to do something.”
“Like what?”
“I’m aware, ladies, that book club has been a strictly politics-free zone since 2016—”
“For good reason. Anissa Dunne was traumatized. She’s never come back.”
“I think it’s time to reassess.”
“Are you kidding me? Now? Not for the school shootings or border crisis, or the Black Lives Matter movement—”
“Those aren’t political issues, those are human-rights issues.”
“And we just stay in our safe little Karen bubble.”
“Can we please not debate that nickname again?”
“If you have a problem with the term ‘Karen’ you need to ask yourself why. Why are you getting so defensive, are you trying to uphold a system—”
“The system created the nickname because where is the male equivalent! God forbid women express anger or entitlement, without the world needing to slap them back down—”
“Ladies, this is happening here. Here.” Janine’s shout broke through the discussion. “The vandal is hurting us in our homes.”
Around the circle was a cluster of small, worried nods.
“We need to make a unified statement,” Janine said. “A celebration of diversity.”
Jen, who’d been lazily sipping her drink, choked on it. She felt the sting of alcohol up her noise and struck her chest twice with her fist.