I read it back once, couldn’t come up with anything better, and sent it.
Then I got up.
My bedroom was the smallest room in the cabin and my favorite. A full bed pushed under the window that looked out on the trees. A quilt my grandmother had made me before she died, worn soft at the edges from years of being hauled aroundin a duffel bag before it finally got to live on an actual bed. A nightstand with a lamp and a glass of water I refilled every night. A dresser against the opposite wall, taller than it was wide, with nothing on top of it but a small wooden dish where I dropped my wallet at the end of the day.
Except now there was a stack of books on it too.
Four of them. All from Cara’s shop.Persuasion, which she’d insisted I borrow the day after lunch. She wanted me to reread it so we could discuss it because it was her favorite. I’d finished in two nights and meant to return, and had not.A Gentleman in Moscow, which she’d put into my hands last Tuesday when I’d stopped by on my lunch break without a plan, sayingjust trust me.A paperback of short stories by a writer I’d never heard of, which she’d said reminded her of someone who would like exactly what she liked without being able to explain why. And a small blue hardcover about rivers in the Pacific Northwest that she’d spotted on her own shelf two days ago when I’d mentioned the mallards and pressed into my hand at the door when I was leaving, sayingfor your morning window.
The stack had been growing all week. I’d noticed it yesterday and again this morning. At some point, I was going to have to do something about it, because a dresser was not a bookshelf, and Cara Darlington was apparently going to keep handing me books until I had one. I was going to buy a bookshelf. I’d made the decision without quite realizing I was making it—something small and wooden, that would fit against the wall next to the dresser and hold what was already there, and also, probably, everything that was still coming, because I could not imagine her stopping.
I picked upPersuasionfrom the top of the stack. I’d been telling myself for three days that I’d return it. Today I was actually going to.
I went to start the coffee.
I moved carefully to the kitchen. I’d gotten good at mornings over the last few months—you learn how to move a damaged joint through its first twenty minutes of the day, and then you and the joint come to an understanding for the rest of it. I started the coffee and stood at the small table by the window, watching the light come up over the tree line.
For a long time, this life had been enough.
It had been enough until lunch with Cara.
I stood at the window with my coffee and thought about her forehead against mine in the hallway of her apartment. I thought about the sage green scarf at her throat. I thought about her sitting at the end of the bar on Thursday night with a paperback and a glass of wine, and the way her fingers had brushed mine on the stem of the second glass, and how I’d stood there for a full thirty seconds not moving because I’d been afraid of what I’d do if I did. I was in deeper than I’d meant to be. I’d known that for days, and I’d stopped trying to talk myself out of it, which was either the smartest thing I’d done in a long time or the most reckless, and most mornings I couldn’t tell which.
I went through the day in the slow, careful way I went through most days now. Groceries. The post office. A long walk along the river behind the cabin, because my knee did better with movement than without. A sandwich at the kitchen table. By two o’clock, I was in clean clothes withPersuasiontucked under my arm and was driving into town with the intention of stopping at Cara’s shop on my way to work.
The afternoon light through the windshield was soft and gold. The leaves on the trees coming into town were just starting to turn at the edges. I drove the route I drove most days—past the Coffee Cabin where Eliza was working the window, past the hardware store, past the diner where two men in flannel were sitting on the porch like they had every afternoon since I’d come back.
I parked at the curb in front of Pine & Pages.
Through the front window, I could see Cara behind the register, ringing up a woman in a yellow coat. Two other customers—someone at the fiction wall, someone near the cookbooks in the back. The display in the front window had been changed since I’d last been in. All warm fall colors now, books propped against a small wooden crate with a string of dried orange leaves arranged across the front. I sat in the truck for a second, telling myself I was just returning a book and not changing my life.
Then I got out, tuckedPersuasiona little more securely under my arm, and pushed through the door. The bell made its small, soft sound. Cara looked up from the register, and her face did something unguarded for just a moment—a small softening she probably didn’t know I could see from here—before the shopkeeper’s smile came back. But I’d seen it. I always saw it, and it did something to me every time that I had not yet found a way to be sensible about.
“Hi,” she said. Just that. But it was for me, not like she said it to a random customer.
“Hi.” I crossed to the counter.
The woman in the yellow coat finished her transaction. Cara handed her a paper bag with the receipt sticking out of the top, said something kind about hoping she’d enjoy it, and the woman thanked her and edged past me with a polite smile. The bell chimed as she went out.
“Twice in one week,” she said, looking up at me with the expression she used when she was pleased about something and trying not to show it too obviously. “People are going to start talking.”
“Let them,” I said, and held upPersuasion.
Her eyes went to the book and then back to me, and the smile she’d been trying to fight came through. “You actually read it again?”
“Every word.”
She reached for the book. I handed it over, and our fingers stayed on the cover longer than the handoff required. Neither of us pulled back. She turned it slowly in her hands and ran one finger down the spine the way I’d watched her do with a hundred other books, like she was greeting it, and when she looked up at me there was a question in her eyes that had nothing to do with whether I’d enjoyed the ending.
“Tell me what you actually thought,” she said, quieter now, leaning her elbows on the counter. “Not the short version. The real one.”
I considered her for a second—the way she was looking at me, open and genuinely waiting, like my answer was something she’d been thinking about since she’d handed the book to me.
“I thought it was about people who almost ruined their own lives by being too careful,” I said. “Both of them. Not just him. She let other people decide for her about something that mattered, and he spent eight years pretending he was over it when he wasn’t, and they almost missed each other a second time because they were both so afraid of being wrong that they couldn’t say what they wanted out loud.” I paused. “And I thought Anne was the most patient person in any book I’ve ever read, and that Wentworth almost didn’t deserve her, and that the letter was the only thing that saved him.”
Cara was very still.
“That,” she said, after a moment, “is the best thing anyone has ever said to me about that book. Including professors who were paid to have opinions about it.”
