Prologue
Cara,
I don’t know if writing this makes things easier or harder. I just know I didn’t want to leave without saying something, and I’ve never been very good at saying the right things out loud.
I keep thinking about those afternoons in the library. You pretending not to notice when I lost track of time. Me pretending I didn’t care that you always knew what I meant before I finished a sentence. I don’t think I ever told you how much that mattered to me.
I’m doing what I said I would. I’m leaving. It feels strange to write that down, like it makes it more real than I’m ready for. Everyone keeps asking if I’m excited. I am, I guess. Mostly, I’m steady. That feels like the right word.
I wanted you to know that I never took your kindness lightly. Or your patience. Or the way you listened like I was worth the effort. You were never just helping me get through a class. You were… important.
I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know who I’ll be when I come back. I just know that knowing you has already shaped me more than most people ever will.
Take care of yourself. Keep reading. Keep noticing things the way you do. The world needs people who pay attention.
Thank you—for everything.
—Jasper
Chapter 1
Cara
Closing up Pine & Pages at the end of the day was one of my favorite things. I’d lock the door, flip the sign, and stand still for a moment while the shop settled around me—the soft light, the smell of old paper, the deep satisfaction of a day that had gone how it was supposed to. Then I’d go upstairs to my apartment, my cats, my tea, and whatever book I was in the middle of, and I would feel, with complete sincerity, that it was enough.
I was thirty-two years old, and I had stopped dating approximately fourteen months ago, after a two-year relationship ended. I was not heartbroken. That was the part I’d had to deal with—the fact that the end had felt more like relief than loss, which said something about the relationship and possibly something about me too, and which I had eventually decided to stop examining and simply accept. I liked my life. I liked my shop and my cats and my sisters and my grandparents and the pace of a small town that knew your name and mostly left you alone when you wanted it to. I wasn’t lonely at all. I was fine. I was absolutely, completely fine.
My great-grandmother had opened Pine & Pages on the corner of Sycamore and Mill Street because she believed a townlike Honeybrook Hollow deserved a place where stories could live, and somewhere along the way, that belief had passed through my grandfather and settled in me along with the keys to the shop. Three generations, same corner, same smell of old paper and possibility.
Being here was my favorite thing in the world, and tonight I was leaving it for a date I already regretted accepting.
I’d said yes to Eric Michaelson for the same reason I said yes to most things I shouldn’t—I’d been caught off guard and couldn’t find a kind way out fast enough. He’d been calling the shop every few days for the last few months, always with a reason just plausible enough that I couldn’t quite object to it.Did I have a good recommendation for his nephew? Had I ever read such and such? Was I going to the Honeybrook Hollow Harvest Days street market?Each call a little warmer than the last, a little more personal, the conversational equivalent of someone slowly moving their chair closer to yours and waiting to see if you’d notice. Last week he’d asked me to dinner, and I’d said yes before I’d finished thinking it through.
He’d always been like this. I’d just forgotten. Sophomore year at Sweetbriar High, he’d gone through a phase of deciding he liked me. Eric had been good-looking, and he knew it. He was confident and used to getting what he wanted. He’d started appearing at my locker between classes, leaning against the one next to mine with that same entitled ease he still had now, asking if I’d heard about this or that, whether I was going to the game, whether I wanted a ride home. I remembered one afternoon in particular—January, the hallway cold from a door someone kept propping open—when he’d waited for me after last period with a soda from the vending machine, handed it to me like it was nothing, and stood there while I drank it, talking about a movie he thought I should see. It was almost sweet. It might have been sweet if I’d felt anything when he looked at me. I hadn’t. I’d beenfifteen, and my head had been elsewhere entirely, full of library hours and the hot senior boy I was tutoring in English. Eric Michaelson’s vending machine soda hadn’t stood a chance.
I’d told him as kindly as I could that I didn’t see him that way, and he’d nodded and smiled and shown up at my locker the next day anyway. And the day after that. It went on long enough that my sister, Lucy, who had never once in her life waited for someone else to handle something she could handle faster and louder, took it upon herself to have a conversation with him in the hallway that I hadn’t been present for and didn’t ask about. Whatever she said, it worked. Eric redirected his attention elsewhere. He’d moved on after graduation—college, a woman he met there, a marriage, a whole life built somewhere I wasn’t paying attention to. Lucy had never forgiven him for the locker stalking era, which I’d always thought was a little excessive and which I was now reconsidering.
My reasoning for saying yes to dinner with him had seemed almost sound. One dinner. Somewhere public. Eric would see that I was perfectly ordinary company and whatever he’d built up in his head would quietly deflate, and we could go back to being people who were friendly when we ran into each other at the grocery store. It seemed like a practical decision at the time. I was considerably less sure about that now, fifteen minutes into a drive to Willowmist Falls with the radio on low and the Honeybrook Hollow town limit sign disappearing in my rearview mirror.
The drive between the two towns was at its best in September—the trees on either side of the road had turned deep amber and red, colors so intense they looked almost artificial against a darkening sky, the last of the light catching the tops of the maples before it gave up entirely for the evening. Under different circumstances I would have enjoyed it. I rolled the window down a crack and let the cold air in, sharp and clean and smelling offallen leaves and the faint sweetness of someone’s fireplace lit up for the season, and told myself two hours was not very long. He’d be over me by the end of the evening, and I wouldn’t have to worry about any future awkwardness in town.
The Hearthstone was on the main strip in Willowmist Falls—one of those restaurants with dark wood paneling, candles, and fresh-cut flowers on the tables. I’d driven past it before without ever going in. Finding a parking spot directly out front felt less like good luck and more like the universe pointing at the door and raising its eyebrows at me. I sat for a moment after I cut the engine. The street had gone quiet at this hour, the storefronts dark, festive pumpkin luminaries still glowing orange on a few of the front steps, the hanging baskets along the streetlights swapped out for dried corn and autumn wreaths. A couple walked past arm in arm, breath visible in the cold mountain air.
I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror—lipstick fine, hair fine, expression not quite fine but passable—and told myself what I’d been telling myself since I locked up the shop. Two hours. Then I’d head to my oldest sister’s bar, The Twilight Tavern, for sister night, and the part of the evening I was actually looking forward to.
I got out of the car.
Eric was already inside, which I’d expected. He was standing near the host’s podium rather than seated, which I hadn’t expected, and when he saw me come through the door, his face did something that moved through warm and just past it. His gaze traveled down and back up before it reached my eyes, slow enough that I felt it, quick enough that I wasn’t sure if it was offensive. I kept my expression open and my pace easy and reminded myself that I was a grown woman who had agreed to this of her own free will and that two hours was not very long.
“Cara.” He smiled and stepped forward. “You look incredible.”
“Thanks.” I let him kiss my cheek and followed the host to our table. He pulled out my chair, and I sat and picked up the menu and tried to settle into the evening like it was somewhere I wanted to be.
The restaurant was genuinely beautiful; I’d give it that. This was the kind of place you brought someone you were trying to impress, or someone you were trying to establish something with.
The first part of the evening was fine. Eric was easy to talk to in the way of people who’d had a lot of practice at it—he asked questions, he laughed at the right moments, he told a story about a minor disaster at his law firm that was actually funny, and I found myself relaxing in small increments the way you do when you’re waiting for something, and it keeps not arriving.
Then he asked about Pine & Pages.
