Story for the Week
For the record, I would not make anything from my wisdom teeth. I don’t know that I would have kept my wisdom teeth given the option. To be honest, I didn’t even know that someone could keep their wisdom teeth. But I very recently found out that is, in fact, an option.
I think a lot of kids grow up fearing the dentist. I grew up despising my dentist. As a child, any type of needle terrified me (I’ll Watch Gore, but I Can NOT Tolerate Needles). I also had a lot of cavities that required trips to the dentist. For my first fillings, the dentist used nitrous oxide…aka laughing gas. He would typically give me the nitrous, inject the Novocain, and then do whatever work he had to do. As I got older, still terrified of needles, he pushed not to use the nitrous.
The last time I saw that dentist, I was 19. (Yes, it took me well into my 20s to get over my fear of needles.) He wanted to just give me the Novocain versus using the nitrous, and I panicked. I begged him to use the nitrous, and he chided me for being so grown and not getting the Novocain. He belittled me, told me he almost got rid of the nitrous altogether because no one asked for it anymore.
Eventually, he gave in. But he didn’t go through his normal process of nitrous, Novocain, dental work. He actually skipped the Novocain, which I didn’t know until I started to come out of the nitrous while he finished drilling my tooth. All I could do was keep a death grip on the chair, mouth open, tears streaming while he actively drilled my tooth. He basically punished me—tortured me—for being afraid of needles. I met my dad in the waiting room afterward. As we left the office, I told him I would never go back. And I didn’t.
A good number of years later, a young dentist bought my old dentist’s practice. They called patients to re-establish care, and it had been quite a few years since I had been to the dentist. By then, I had a job with my own insurance. I had started seeing a dermatologist who regularly injected cortisone into my face. 🫣 While I still didn’t like needles, I had gotten over my debilitating fear of them.
Dr. Jeffrey Weller is the reason I started going back to the dentist regularly. He eventually removed my wisdom teeth—one at a time as they broke through the gum so that I wouldn’t need an oral surgeon. Only the last one gave him any trouble. It shattered, and he spent about 45 minutes removing it piece by piece. That was the only one that required stitches. I even laughed when he asked his nurse to clean the blood off my face so that I didn’t scare the patients in the waiting room. I laughed…at the dentist’s office. 😯
That’s when I really learned that the right doctor makes all the difference.
I stuck with Dr. Weller for a very long time. He eventually closed the small practice near my home and only had a practice in the Chicago Gold Coast. I worked in the Hancock Center at the time, so it was within walking distance of my office. When I started working from home and stopped going downtown regularly, I drove into the city for appointments for quite a while. I eventually found a dentist closer to home though. But thanks to Dr. Weller, I didn’t fear the dentist anymore. If you’re in the Chicago area, I definitely recommend you check him out if you’re in the market for a new dentist.
Recently, our friend Aly had to have two of her wisdom teeth removed. She mentioned that her dentist planned to use nitrous and then Novocain. Like many other people, going to the dentist made her nervous. I reminded her of the importance of taking care of your teeth. Even though I was surprised she wouldn’t be seeing an oral surgeon, I knew the nitrous would be fine.
After her procedure, we received a text with a photo. Aly’s dentist told her that she did great and that her teeth popped out without a problem. The photo? She got to keep her wisdom teeth! She called it “the most interesting sensation ever” and that she “grew these bad boys,” and the dentist was just going to dispose of them anyway. Her friends were jealous because they didn’t get to keep theirs. Heck, I’m jealous! And I don’t even know that I would have wanted mine!
In the book reviewed below, one of the characters loses an adult tooth and can’t stop playing with her temporary tooth. It was probably a good thing that when she lost the tooth, she really lost it. She might have been the type of person to make the lost tooth into some sort of jewelry…like Aly.
Aly wants to turn her wisdom teeth into a pair of earrings. 🤦♀️🤣
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die by Mallory Arnold
346 pages
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press.
Publisher’s Description
One isolated cabin. One cheating boyfriend. One plan to get even.
When Nora, Ruby, and Cham discover that they’ve each been dating the same man, what starts as outrage quickly spirals into a plot for revenge. Together they hatch a plan to lure their boyfriend to a romantic getaway in a secluded cabin at the top of a snow-covered mountain.
Only what was meant to be harmless payback soon takes a chilling turn when their not-so-adoring boyfriend is found dead in the cabin.
Stranded and snowed in, the women begin to look at each other with increasing suspicion. And as tensions rise, hidden motives come to light. To survive, each woman must confront her own demons as they fight to uncover if one of them is the killer, or if something else lurks in the freezing wilderness, waiting to pick them off one by one.
************
Main Characters:
- Cham Fenmo – name is short for Champagne, owns her own repair shop, she and Jason see each other a couple times a week, ride motorcycles together, donated a kidney for Jason two years ago, has been dating Jason for three years
- Jason Porter #1 – dating Cham, she calls him the ultimate gig worker, notoriously broke, he’s always borrowing money from her for one thing or another, plans to help a friend on a contracting job and wants to borrow Cham’s tools
- Nora Callahan – high school cross-country coach who doubles as the receptionist, her mom died when she was a baby so she was raised by her single dad who adores Jason and acts like he is the son he never had, has been dating Jason for a year
- Jason Porter #2 – dating Nora, champion tennis star in college, has run the Boston Marathon multiple times, rock climber, black belt, spent seven years on a ski team, his mom has a rare heart disease that requires frequent hospital stays, aspiring musician
- Ruby – a kindergarten teacher, adopted as a baby when her biological parents died from a drug overdose, her parents are both wealthy surgeons who pay for her apartment, has been through significant amounts of therapy and takes medication for a dissociative fugue condition, has been dating Jason for six months
- Jason Porter #3 – dating Ruby, works at an insurance firm near Montana State University, interested in the stock market and a new cryptocurrency as an investment
- Thalia – meets the other three women in a coffee shop after they rescue her from an abusive boyfriend
- Mike Brown – lead investigator for what happens in the remote cabin where the three women take Jason to get revenge
Trigger warning: cult back story
This is my first read by Mallory Arnold, and while I went into it with high hopes, it will be my last. This book started out like the description, but it fell down from that description extremely quickly…and not in a good way.
The story begins with someone (we don’t know who) discovering a dead body (we don’t know whose). The same chapter then becomes a transcript of an interrogation of Nora, Cham, and an unidentified “miss” who we assume to be Ruby. Mike Brown clearly believes the women are guilty of killing someone. Cham and Nora disagree about what they should be sharing with the investigator.
As Chapter 1 opens, we meet Nora and her version of Jason, followed by Ruby in Chapter 2, and then Cham in Chapter 3. All three women are completely smitten with their version of Jason. All three women get asked for an expensive favor. I have to be honest. I know people get scammed, but I just don’t believe these characters. All three women are scammed despite their obvious suspicion of Jason’s requests. As readers, we’re expected to believe that they are all educated and super gullible—smitten by a boy (sigh). 😍🥰🙄🤮
Jason asks Nora for $10,000 for his mother to have surgery. He says he wouldn’t ask if he weren’t desperate. Nora previously opened two credit cards to pay for flights for him to visit his mother. Now he asks her to dip into her emergency fund. Before her first chapter ends, she thinks: “Then he pulls me back into his chest. I let myself feel like a good person for a few seconds but then have to address the nettling thought itching at my brain. It’s just…weird. Jason is so upset, but his cheeks are bone dry. Like he hasn’t shed a single tear.”
With Ruby, Jason asks her to invest $20,000 in a new cryptocurrency. She doesn’t have the money but agrees to take it from her parents’ account. Jason guarantees that she will quadruple her investment within a week. At the end of her chapter, she thinks: “The waitress comes over and sets the bill down on the edge of the table. And that’s where it stays for the next twenty minutes, until I pick it up. ‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ he says distractedly. ‘I’ll get the next one.’ I smile weakly. He’s said that the last eight times.”
And finally Cham. Jason asks to borrow her very expensive shop tools to help his friend Tito work on a fixer-upper that will result in a huge payout. She gives him one day because she will have to close the shop without the tools, which are worth at least $10,000. When she agrees, he says he can’t wait to tell Isaac. She thinks: “I can’t lose myself in him like I usually do. Because something is nagging at me—and it’s not the side mirror digging into my hip. Didn’t he say his friend’s name was Tito?”
From here, the book rotates between each woman’s first-person point of view. One of the biggest problems I had with this is that all of the women sounded the same. I found myself constantly going back to the beginning of a chapter to remind myself who was narrating. Multiple POVs can be amazingly effective, but only if each character has a unique voice.
I also wasn’t crazy about the writing in general. The author seems to throw in a lot of random details that do nothing to move the story along…almost as if she’s just showing off her wealth of knowledge. And they’re all narrations, not conversations. So it’s basically the characters narrating in their heads to the reader.
Ruby talks about the derivation of the word “hysterical.” Cham talks about statistically how many times a woman will try to leave an abusive partner. Cham thinks about frostbite and how you can’t be precise with a socket wrench with dead fingers. Ruby clues us in on the fact that in a three- or four-answer multiple choice question, statistically the most common answer is C. And Nora constantly thinks about how she would coach her cross-country team. This is supposed to be a scary horror thriller, and these sorts of distractions just don’t make any sense.
In terms of the story itself, I love the idea that the three women meet and decide to seek revenge on their three-timing, scammy boyfriend. But the way they meet and devise a plan and everything that happens after is chockful of unbelievable coincidences and ridiculous premises.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Let’s talk about how they meet. Ruby is on the phone with her mom, learning that her bio parents left her a remote cabin in the mountains two hours away from Bozeman. Nora gets distracted while driving and almost hits Ruby with her car but runs into a telephone pole instead. They call a tow truck, and the car gets towed to (you guessed it) Cham’s shop. While there, Ruby calls her Jason on speaker, and Cham hears her Jason’s voice. Realizing what just occurred, Nora calls her Jason on speaker and hangs up when he answers.
So the women clearly live and work close enough together in the pretty large town of Bozeman, Montana. Jason is smart enough to hook three women and scam them. But he’s not smart enough to date women who live further apart and not smart enough to give them a fake name? And in all of the time all of this has been happening, none of them have ever run into Jason out with another woman?
Then there’s Thalia, who the three women meet in a cafe and “rescue” her from an abusive boyfriend. When they come up with their plan to somehow lure Jason to the cabin to scare a confession out of him, they think of asking Thalia—who they met once—to create a dating profile to match with Jason. She would then take him for a weekend away at the cabin, and the other three women will be there waiting.
From there, the unrealistic twists keep on coming.
- Cham’s kidney donation was supposed to be a part of a domino donation, and Cham’s kidney was meant for another woman. The doctor made a mistake and then realized that Cham was, in fact, a match for Jason and gave her the option to donate to Jason or stay in the domino. She chose Jason, of course.
- Thalia’s name is actually Becca. She’s been looking for Cham for the last two years because her sister was supposed to get Cham’s kidney and ended up dying. When the three women happen to meet her in the cafe, she stays in touch with Cham. When they ask her to lure Jason to the cabin, she agrees because this is her chance to get her revenge on Cham for allowing her sister to die.
- Ruby meets Theo in a coffee shop in town before heading up to the cabin. She tells him that she’s there with friends to ski…that her parents left her a cabin on the mountain. He tells her all about the history of the White Wed cult that used to live at the top of the mountain. Theo is a bit of an historian and a lot obsessed with the whole cult.
- Ruby’s parents were part of the White Wed cult that wanted to take over the town of Stoneveil. When the people in the town decided to basically massacre the cult members, the children were adopted out. Theo was also one of the children adopted out, so when Ruby tells him her parents left her a cabin, he knows who she is and wants to bring her back into the fold and start the cult back up.
- Mike Brown, the investigator, is Theo’s baby brother, also adopted out. He doesn’t want the cult to come back. He kills Jason and Thalia (Becca) and plans to frame the three women for their murders. When Theo shows up to save Ruby, Mike kills him and plans to kill the women.
- When the women succeed at killing Mike but not before he smashes the transcription tape, they are hospitalized but under arrest. Conveniently, the transcriber has a hidden transcription machine. Mike didn’t want to modernize, but she’s 20-something and it makes the transcription easier, so she hid it under the desk. She has a recording of everything that happened in the interrogation room, so the women are all exonerated.
- And to top it off, Ruby, who didn’t want children because of her hereditary dissociative fugue disorder, is pregnant with Jason’s baby. All of the women think about the fact that Jason would have been an amazing father. (WHAT?!) Ruby has the baby, the women stay best of friends…and they all live happily ever after.
If you’re looking for an unexpected twisty thriller…without all the ridiculousness I just described…take a pass on this one. It’s a big no for me.
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