Everyone in the circle heard the pain in Jenna’s voice, noticed the white-knuckled grip she had on her knitting and that she’d stopped stitching altogether.

“Oh, honey.” Dropping her own knitting, Grace dragged her chair closer to Jenna’s side and took her hands. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. And here I was being such a smart-ass.”

“It’s okay,” Jenna murmured, although her watery voice and wavering words clearly revealed the claim to be a lie. “It was just sex, and we both knew it wasn’t leading anywhere. It had to end sometime.”

Ronnie, who had leaned in close to Jenna’s other side and was rubbing comforting circles in the center of her back, whispered, “But you didn’t want it to, did you?”

Jenna took a deep, shuddering breath. “It doesn’t matter.” Straightening slightly, she shook her head, sending her short, black hair fluttering. “Things were never going to work out. Not while we were married, and not now.”

She lifted her gaze, which was wet with tears. “He’s never going to change his mind. I don’t think I ever really believed that before, but I do now.”

“What did he say?” Grace wanted to know.

Jenna shook her head again and gave her two closest friends a meaningful glance that clearly said she’d share the details with them later, but wasn’t ready to bare her soul just yet, in front of everyone. “Suffice to say I got the point this time. Loud and clear.”

Inhaling dramatically, Grace wrapped her arm around Jenna’s shoulders and squeezed her close. “We make quite the pair, don’t we? Obviously we are not cut out to be involved with the males of our species. I say we swear off the opposite sex altogether,” she announced with feeling. “We should start a ‘Men are Scum’ Club, where we sit around drinking girlie cocktails and discussing why testosterone is the curse of humanity and anyone with a Y-chromosome should be dragged into the street and shot.”

At first, Charlotte didn’t think Grace’s good-natured teasing would have the desired effect. Jenna looked entirely too miserable to find anything amusing at this point.

But after a few minutes, she sniffed, wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand, then raised her head to face Grace. “Can I be the president?”

Grace chuckled and hugged her again. “Absolutely. I’ll be your vice president, and we’ll have signs and buttons made up to promote the group. Our logo will be a twig and two berries with a big red line through them. No dicks allowed.”

Laughter went around the circle, breaking the veil of tension that had fallen over the group. Slowly but surely, the women returned to their knitting, filling the area once again with the clickety-clack of needles on needles.

Grace and Ronnie, too, leaned back in their seats and picked up their respective projects.

“I think you’re just looking for another excuse to toss back pretty-colored drinks,” Ronnie shot in Grace’s direction.

“Like I need an excuse,” Grace retorted. Then, in a stage whisper aside to Jenna, she said, “Don’t listen to her. She’s been consorting with the enemy and is just jealous she hasn’t had an epiphany about what assholes they are like the rest of us enlightened ones.”

Ronnie raised a skeptical brow. “Until recently, you were ‘consorting’ with the enemy, too. More often than I do, I’d venture to guess.”

Grace rolled her eyes and leaned forward to stick her tongue out at Ronnie around Jenna, who sat between them. “But I have since seen the error of my ways,” she proclaimed in a very put-upon tone. “That’s why they call it an epiphany and why I’m enlightened, thankyou-verymuch.”

From there, the conversation broke down into dirty jokes and the denigration of men, with Zack Hoolihan and Gage Marshall getting the brunt of the women’s disgruntlement.

Charlotte was barely listening to any of that, though. She was much too wrapped up in worries over why the enchanted yarn hadn’t worked.

It had apparently gotten Jenna and Gage back together for a short while-which certainly hadn’t been her intention. She’d wanted Jenna to find a new man, not go back to the same one who’d already broken her heart once before. (Even if Gage was a nice enough young fellow otherwise.)

But if the yarn had gotten them back together, then it was supposed to keep them together. The spinning wheel was said to create yarn that brought true love, not temporary lust with a misery chaser.

This wasn’t good, and it wasn’t right, and there had to be something she could do.

Purl 18

“I think I fucked up.”

Gage took a swig of beer from the bottle in his hand, doing his best to block out the noise around him. The raised voices of bar patrons, the competing programs playing on two separate televisions, the clanking of glasses from people drinking and waitresses filling or clearing orders.

It all clumped and clanged in his head, adding to the pressure there, making him wonder if he should drink more in an attempt to block it out… or drink less to keep the sensitive tissues of his brain from becoming so susceptible in the first place.

Zack and Dylan were with him-on their usual night, at their usual table-and had been since around seven o’clock. It was now nearing midnight, and Gage was pretty sure he could accurately predict that Jenna was not going to show up, after all. It was Wednesday night, her knitting group’s meeting night, so she should have.

He’d followed the normal routine of meeting his friends with the sole purpose of being there when she came in with Ronnie and Grace. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d planned to do or say once she arrived, but he suspected it would have involved embarrassing himself in some fashion.

Now, though, he was sort of pissed that she hadn’t shown up. Sure, she’d saved him public humiliation, but she’d also robbed him of the chance to see her, talk to her, do… something to make up for the way things had ended back at her aunt’s place.

It hadn’t been quite a week since he’d climbed on his Harley and headed back to the city, but it felt like months. Years, even. The longest four days of his life.

Every second of every minute since walking away from her-knowing it was really over and that they’d both finally said everything they had to say to each other-had made him feel worse. Made his insides tighten and his skin twitch.

If leaving had been the reasonable thing to do, he kept thinking, shouldn’t he feel better about it? When a decision was right, it was supposed to have a calming effect. You were supposed to breathe easier and find inner peace.

All he’d found was one more thing to keep him up at night. One more regret to add to his ever-growing list.

This was one regret, though, that he wasn’t sure he could live with. Each day that passed made him feel worse, made him wrack his brain for a way to fix what he’d broken.

Talking with his friends at the precinct had helped. For the first time in a long time, he’d opened his eyes a bit and paid attention to what was going on around him. Not job-wise, but deeper, in the personal lives of the men and women he worked with.

He’d spent years thinking law enforcement and family didn’t mix. Apparently, he was one of the few guys on the force who held that belief. Most of them were married; a lot of them, married or not, had kids. Many were divorced, sure-police work added a level of stress to relationships that most folks didn’t have to deal with-but he had to admit that his observations mostly turned up happy, normal family lives.

So why couldn’t he have that, too?

It was the first time he’d really let himself consider the possibility, and it didn’t sit well because it meant he’d been functioning about fifty points shy of the average IQ. Jenna had tried to tell him that all along, tried to convince him he could be a good husband, a good father, and a good cop.