Cozy, but make it stabby.
That last one almost got a laugh out of me.
I pulled a book free, flipped it open, and pretended to read. The floor creaked again somewhere behind me. The soft thud ofa book being set down. The faint clink of a ceramic mug against the counter. I could still picture her without looking. The way she held herself, as if she belonged here now, surrounded by books.
She’d always belonged in a place like this, I realized. I just hadn’t seen it then. Back in the Sweetbriar High library, she’d sat across from me with a notebook open, tapping her pen lightly against the page while she explained things I should’ve already understood. She never rushed me. Never made it obvious I was behind. Sometimes she’d read passages out loud, then look up at me—not waiting for the right answer. Just waiting to see whatmyanswer would be. As if I couldn’t be wrong, just different. I ended up staying longer and longer for our sessions.
The chime of the bell brought me back to the present. I turned a page I didn’t absorb, and finally glanced up.
The customer was gone. Cara was still behind the counter, but now she was alone, head bent again over the clipboard. She exhaled slowly, shoulders rising, then dropping as if she’d just reset something in herself.
I stepped up before I could overthink it. The creaky floor gave me away.
Her head lifted. For a second—just a second—something unguarded crossed her face. A surprised smile lit up her face, there and gone in a second. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” My voice came out lower than I intended. I set the book on the counter. It landed with a soft thump between us.
She glanced down at it, buying herself a second. Her fingers curled around the edge, turning it just enough to read the title. “Mystery?” she asked.
“Seemed like a place to start.”
“Yeah.” She nodded once. “That one’s good. It—” She stopped, shook her head lightly. “It keeps you guessing.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
Her mouth tipped at that. Not quite a smile, but close—and I felt it move through me before I’d decided to let it. I’d forgotten how she did that. How something that small from her could land somewhere disproportionate. I kept my expression where it was and said nothing.
She rang it up, movements automatic—tap, scan, bag. Efficient. Routine. But her fingers hesitated when the register lagged, and I noticed the hesitation the way I noticed everything about her right now, which was too closely and without much ability to stop.
We used to talk for hours. That was the thing sitting at the back of my throat while I stood there watching her press buttons with unnecessary focus. Two kids in a school library, and the time had moved differently in there—slower, more meaningful. Afternoons that felt like peace, that felt like discovery. She’d made conversation feel like the easiest thing in the world, and I hadn’t understood until much later how rare that was. Now she was only inches away from me across a counter, and we were talking about a book neither of us was thinking about, and the distance between those two versions of the same thing was not something I knew what to do with.
“So,” she said, a little too casually. “You’ve been… around.”
I huffed a quiet breath. “Yeah.”
Her eyes flicked up to mine, then away just as quickly. “Honeybrook Hollow isn’t exactly a big place. Nowhere to hide.”
“True.”
She wasn’t wrong. I’d been aware of that—of her—every time our paths had crossed since I came back. I’d managed it by keeping things simple. Polite. Distant in a way I’d told myself was considerate rather than cowardly. Standing on the other side of this counter, close enough to see the pen mark on her index finger and the small crease between her brows, and herbeautiful brown eyes, I was considerably less convinced by my own reasoning.
The receipt printed with a soft whirr. She tore it off, then didn’t hand it to me right away. Her gaze drifted to the sign taped near the register.
“Oh—” She gestured toward it, then dropped her hand halfway through the motion like she wasn’t sure she wanted to draw attention to it. “We’re doing that. Friday.”
“I saw the poster in the window.”
“Right.” She nodded, then immediately looked like she wished she hadn’t. “It’s—um. It’s small. Not, like, a big thing. Just… people, and clues, and—” She let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh.
Something loosened in my chest at that. The almost-laugh. The way she did that thing where she started explaining something and then seemed to catch herself mid-sentence as if she’d said too much. I remembered that too. I’d spent a lot of time in that library hoping she’d keep talking past the point where she thought she should stop.
“Sounds like your kind of thing,” I said.
That got her. A real smile this time—full and unguarded, the kind that made everything else in the room recede—and then it was gone almost as fast as it came, as if she’d remembered where she was and reeled it back in. I wanted to say something that would bring that pretty smile back. I didn’t.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is.” She tapped the edge of the book lightly against the counter, once, twice. Then handed me the receipt.
Her fingers brushed mine—light and quick, but it felt like more. I went very still. The warmth of her touch registered somewhere it had no business registering and stayed there.
