Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Goldie Collins, a.k.a. a life coach not currently regretting any of her decisions ... which is about to change drastically

Is there anything more satisfying than watching someone you don’t like make a SERIOUS mistake with their facial hair?

Yes, yes, I know. In the grand scheme of life, there are probably worse decisions than neglecting to take a razor to your upper lip for ten years.

But Fletcher Huxley’s absolutely horrific mustache is giving me the kind of glee that probably can’t be balanced with a simple donation to a food bank or volunteer stint at a blood drive.

And considering he showed up to this blood drive with a cameraperson in tow, and that he’s recording himself looking like that, apparently with the thought that it’ll help advance his social media side hustle—yep.

My petty glee meter overfloweth.

“Oooh, Evelyn, look at that,” Odette, my seventy-two-year-old neighbor and one of my pro bono clients, says. “Goldie’s making eyes at one of the rugby players.”

“Ew.” I wrinkle my nose at the Black woman in the bright-pink Outlive Our Ex-Boyfriends Club T-shirt. “No. Never. ”

“Mm-hmm.” Her smug grin and dancing brown eyes say she doesn’t believe me.

“Which one?” Evelyn replies. She’s a sixty-nine-year-old white woman in a matching T-shirt, though both her jeans and her dyed brown hair are the height of stylish. She’s also three inches taller than Odette and the VP to Odette’s president in their seasoned ladies’ club.

“The one that looks like MacGyver,” Odette tells her.

Now all three of us are staring at the large tattooed white man sitting in the blood-draw chair. We’re at a senior center near the hockey arena, and my companions are tracking how many donors we get today. They want to beat the number that their rival club, Old Man Bikers, got last week.

“If I were forty years younger, I’d make a pass at him, but not before I told him to shave,” Evelyn says.

I grab a warehouse-size box of single-serving Goldfish cracker packets from beneath the refreshments table along the wall. “The ’stache isn’t all that’s wrong with him,” I mutter to myself.

“I couldn’t date him,” she continues thoughtfully. “I’d kick the bucket before him, and what fun would that be?”

“None at all,” I assure her, louder so that she can hear me. “Even if he kicked the bucket before you, I’m sure it would be awful to date him.”

“We could murder the mustache, though,” Odette says.

Evelyn cackles. “And we could write its obituary.”

“The facial hair of the scowly tattooed giant died an untimely death when runaway kitchen shears—”

“No, when there was an accident with a Weed Eater,” Evelyn interrupts.

“ When a runaway Weed Eater older than color television picked the wrong time to malfunction ,” Odette intones.

The visual makes me smile.

For the record, there are very few people in this world that I genuinely dislike. Three, to be specific.

My ex-boyfriend.

My former best friend.

And Fletcher Huxley.

Trust me when I say they all earned my dislike.

I rarely spend time dwelling on any of them, but there’s Fletcher, right there , impossible to ignore with that mustache. The sight of him is making my chest suck in on itself a little at the memory of what he did the last time I saw him.

Which was supposed to be the last time in my entire life.

And unfortunately wasn’t.