“Everyone settled in alright?” Yvette asked, pushing a rogue curl out of her hair. There was a stack of tarot cards sitting on the side table next to her, a bed of purple velvet fabric falling down onto the floor. She was big on reading them and would often do it for us whenever we needed that little extra guidance.

“Perfect,” she said with a clap of her hands. “There’s plenty more drinks in the fridge, and I ordered us pizza—should be getting here soon. But in the meantime, let’s get this show on the road. Everyone caught up on their reading?”

A chorus of yups and yeses came from the group. I set my book down on my lap, the surrealistic painting of a sinister girl and a suburban house staring back up at me.

Yvette sat back in her seat. There were two large watercolor paintings of her two cats that bordered either side of her, their curving gold frames making the cats look even more regal than the two kings they’d been in real life. “Perf. Okay, so for tonight’s game, I wanted to pull out a card every time we start on a new chapter, but the cards aren’t for us. They’re for the characters. I’ll pull one out, say what it means, and we can all decide which character it’s for. Sound good?”

“Ooh, sounds really fun to me,” Jess said, her girlfriend nodding in agreement.

“Let’s get it started, then.”

And so our book club night officially began. We started it off by talking about the insinuation that the murderer started making the macabre jewelry because of her obsession with her Archie, the main character’s ex-husband, who had a wide collection of rare and expensive jewelry. There was a chapter where Archie and the murderer talk, although the murderer’s POV or name isn’t revealed, so it was clear a link was there between them. It was also insinuated that the murderer was becoming fixated on Gabrielle and targeted her jewelry store ads specifically to bait Gabrielle into buying from her.

Yvette grabbed her deck and gave it a shuffle, closing her eyes before pulling off the topmost card and flipping it over, setting it down on the long white coffee table in the center of the room. It depicted a woman and a man huddling together against a strong and snow-filled wind, the snow flecks glistening silver against the matte background. A silver-and-golden border surrounded the card like ivy growing along its edges.

“Okay, so I asked what are the driving factors behind a character’s motivations. And we got the Five of Pentacles. This card represents extreme financial stress or at least a fear of financial failure. Who do you guys think is scared of that the most?”

Jake perked up, and all eyes turned toward him. “That’s probably Matt, Gabrielle’s brother.”