Jasper scratched Knightley between the shoulder blades, and Knightley tucked his head down into his paws and started to purr. And then, very quietly, Darcy jumped down from the bookshelf and padded over to the couch and hopped up onto the back of it, directly behind Jasper’s right shoulder.
I stopped breathing for a second.
Darcy had not, in the history of my knowing him, ever settled near a new person in the first hour of meeting them. Darcy was a cat who took weeks. Darcy sometimes tookmonths. Darcy was currently a cat who was curled up on the back of my couch about three inches from Jasper’s neck, eyes half-closed, tail draped down against his shoulder blade as if it had always belonged there.
I did not comment on it. I was going to think about it later. I was going to think about ita lot. But I did not comment on it. Jasper’s mouth twitched, just barely, and I knew he’d figured out exactly what had happened and was also not going to comment on it, but I could tell he knew he scored points, both cat points and Cara points, and somehow his deliberate silence about it meant more than any comment would have.
We sat on the couch with my tea going slowly cold in my hands and the afternoon light shifting across the living room floor, and for a while neither of us said anything, which should have been awkward and wasn’t.
Knightley had claimed Jasper’s lap with the serene confidence of a cat who considered himself an excellent judge of character and had rendered his verdict. Jasper looked down athim with an expression of mild surprise, then settled his hand on his back with the careful practicality of a man who had been assessed and was trying to pass.
“He doesn’t do that with everyone,” I said.
“Should I be flattered?”
“Knightley has very high standards. Wentworth will sit on anyone if he has the right motivation. Darcy sits on no one.” I tucked my feet beneath me. “I think you’ve been approved.”
“What does Wentworth think? He’s over there.”
I glanced over to where Wentworth was sitting on the arm of the chair across the room, staring at Jasper with the focused intensity of a cat who had opinions and was still forming them.
“He’ll come around. He always does. He’s very food-motivated. Do you have anything in your pockets?”
Jasper chuckled. “Nothing.”
“That explains the hesitation.”
He looked back down at Knightley, who had begun to purr with the low, steady rumble of a well-maintained engine. “So you named them after Austen characters,” he said.
“I did.”
“Knightley, Wentworth, and Darcy.” He looked at me with a grin. “No Wickham?”
“I would never do that to a cat,” I said, genuinely appalled. “That would be a terrible thing to do to a cat.”
He laughed—a real one, the kind that reached his eyes—and something in my chest responded to it immediately and warmly. “Fair enough,” he said.
We talked about the shop. About a customer who’d come in last week looking for a book whose title she couldn’t remember, the author she couldn’t remember, whose plot, when she described it, turned out to belong to six different books.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I made her a cup of tea, and we figured it out together. It took forty minutes.” I smiled. “It was one of my favorite days this month.”
He shook his head slowly, not dismissively—more like he was filing something away. “Only you,” he said.
“She was eighty-three, and she’d read the book in 1987 and just wanted to find it again. How could I not help?”
“Did she buy it?”
“She bought three. One for herself and two for friends who she said would also love it.” I looked at my tea. “That’s the best part of the whole job, really. That’s what I love about it. You get to be the person who helps someone find the thing they didn’t know they were looking for.”
He was quiet for a moment, looking at me in that way he had. “You’re good at that,” he said. “More broadly than just books.”
I looked back at him and didn’t say anything, because sometimes the way he said things made responding feel unnecessary.
“Tell me about the trail,” I said, after a moment. “Past the old mill. You mentioned it once. A long time ago. Do you still like it up there?”
His face opened as he smiled at me, surprised I’d remembered. “It goes up along the ridge above the falls. You can see three counties from the top on a clear day. I found it when I was a kid—I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t full of people asking how I was, and it was always empty.” He looked at the window. “When I came back, I couldn’t run it for a long time. Because of the knee. Just started walking it again on good days.”
