Free The One in My Heart by Sherry Thomas Page A

Asquith as a surrogate, but still—not every man takes his actual grandmother to remote and beautiful places. You should give the boy a chance.”
    But every chance was a risk, and Bennett was a far bigger risk than most.
    If I wasn’t careful, he could become the kind of semisecret that people whispered about me. Oh, you know there was a man, years ago. But no one else since. Wonder what happened. Poor Evangeline.
    “Are you trying to evict me, Zelda?” I asked, half jokingly. “Have you had enough of me as a housemate?”
    “Oh, no, darling. All I want for you is a spectacular sex life, the kind that will shock people—and make them deeply envious.”
    I blinked. And then the two of us burst out laughing together.
    “You had me for a moment,” I told her, still giggling.
    “Believe me, darling, I do want that for you. But more than anything else I want you to be madly adored.” Zelda ran her hand through my hair. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”
    There was a lump in my throat. I cupped her face and kissed her on her forehead. “All right, I’ll get on that—as soon as I achieve a sex life that will make people both gasp and choke.”
    THE WEEKEND BEFORE THE WEDDING , I had lunch with the Material Girls.
    The Material Girls were my friends from college. We lived in the same dorm building, all majored in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and just kind of gravitated toward one another. I joked once that I always wanted to be referred to as a material girl, and thus was born our collective name.
    After college, we were scattered for a while. But one by one we found our way to the Big Apple. I, the native Manhattanite, was actually the last to relocate six years ago, after I finished grad school.
    Carolyn, our IT expert, was the one who’d given me the T-shirt that had caught Bennett’s eye. Lara worked as a bioengineer. And Daff, who dropped chemistry for molecular gastronomy, picked the restaurant where we met—this time a new place in Williamsburg.
    “So what’s cooking in Hipster Central today?” asked Lara.
    “Do not take the name of the hipsters in vain,” admonished Daff, “for they shall spread the word of thy new establishment. When I have my own restaurant, I want all the hipsters to come and rave about it until the regular folks start giving me their money.”
    “At which point the hipsters can shove it,” said Carolyn.
    Daff laughed. “Exactly. Make my name and then they can go off to their next obscure, authentic discovery.”
    While we looked over the menu, we talked about everyone’s holidays. Carolyn was still recovering from her visit home to Vancouver and a feast every day—her dad was a gourmet home cook who loved to entertain. Lara had been in Cabo, where her cousin got married over Christmas. Daff and I went nowhere—but for Daff that was a professional sacrifice; she’d be taking her vacation in a few days.
    “You really have no life, E,” said Carolyn.
    “Thank you,” I said. “And I worked hard for it too.”
    Lara nudged my shoulder with hers. “And is your vagina still on extended leave?”
    My lack of a love life had long been a running joke among the Material Girls. But they, like Zelda, had bought into the explanation that as a tenure-track professor who must produce an explosion of papers to prove my worth, I simply didn’t have the time. “Oh, come on, you don’t believe that. You know my ‘lab’ is actually a sex dungeon.”
    No point bringing up Bennett yet.
    “And how was the wedding, Lara?” I went on, turning the topic of the conversation away from me.
    “Yeah,” said Daff. “You never said whether What’s-his-name was there.”
    What’s-his-name was the guy who broke off an engagement to Lara to go out with her cousin—the sister of the one who got married.
    Lara shrugged. “He popped in for like a second. I think he left before I even knew he was there.”
    Daff looked disappointed. “So you didn’t