Down the Rabbit Hole

She knew she shouldn’t have confided all that. “What?”


“You just scared the crap out of me, and I’m not even dating you. So, that little speech? Save that for the losers, because it’s the perfect formula to make a guy run screaming.”

“Not the right guy. Not a practical guy.”

“Not a boring guy.”

Macy sat back, conviction warring with confusion. “But that’s who I am, Carolyn. I’m a planner, you know that.”

“Honey,” Carolyn continued, “there’s planning, and there’s crafting a prison sentence. In your plan, the guy doesn’t seem to matter much, beyond setting that whole unbelievably dull-sounding machinery in motion.”

“Of course the guy matters! He’s at the crux of the whole thing!” She bunched her hands together illustratively. Then she looked up. “What do you mean, dull? You’re married, you’ve got kids, you must have thought about all this stuff.”

“Yeah, right.” Carolyn rolled her eyes. “We got together in high school, remember? Back when planning was Hey, who’s getting the keg for this weekend?”

“Huh. You were lucky. You got the whole thing settled early. My trouble is I keep meeting guys who don’t live up to their billing. They seem great on the outside, and they can maintain that facade for a few dates—or, like in Jeremy’s case, a few months—but then, inevitably, the Problem shows up.” She leaned back. “There’s always a Problem. With Jeremy it was the freaking phone. I mean, who wants to look across the table at the top of someone’s head for the rest of their life?”

“If you’re lucky, it’ll have hair on it.”

“Oh, it’ll have hair. I require pictures of parents and grandparents on the second date.”

Carolyn closed her mouth, gathered her napkin and rose from the table.

Macy laughed. “Carolyn, stop! I was kidding!”

“I’ll be right back. I have to think about an adequate response to all that”—she rolled a hand—“stuff.” She walked off.

Chuckling, Macy pulled her phone from her purse, thinking, See? It’s okay when someone leaves the table to check the phone. There is proper cell phone etiquette, and there is cell phone rudeness. A sigh escaped her as she slid her finger across the screen, entered her passcode and saw that nobody had emailed or texted. She’d sort of expected something from Jeremy, a What’s going on? or Can’t we talk about this? But there was nothing. He must have agreed with her decision . . .

She gazed at the familiar checkerboard of apps. Familiar, that was, except for one yellow icon in the lower right corner that seemed to be throbbing.

She looked closer. iLove, it read underneath it. Inside the box was a red heart, surrounded by a bright yellow sun, which was the thing that seemed to be pulsating. She put her finger to the icon and the app burst into a bright full-screen sun, and then up popped what looked like a dating website. Find a Guy, Contact a Guy, See the Guys Looking at You—all with little red heart icons.

Her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t downloaded that. What, were apps just self-installing now? That’ll be the day, she thought, when she used a dating website. It was scary enough going out with someone you’d already laid eyes on. Setting yourself up on a blind date was an idea beyond horrifying.

She closed the application and deleted it.





CHAPTER THREE




Macy’s phone rang again and she nearly threw it against the wall. All day the phone had been ringing, and not once had it been Jeremy.

“Macy Serafini.” She tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear, identified the caller and pulled up the account file on her computer. She was nodding over the client’s points when her coworker April appeared in her doorway. She held up a finger.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “yes. We can try that.” She waved April in. “Let me put something together on that and I’ll email you Monday, how’s that?”