This town had never been big enough to keep secrets, and it certainly wasn’t big enough for separate high schools. Kids from here, Willowmist Falls, and Sweetbriar all ended up funneled into Sweetbriar High—same buses, same classrooms, same shared history, whether we wanted it or not. Back then, the towns felt farther apart than they really were. Ten minutes could feel like another world when you were a teenager without a car. But everyone still knew everyone else.
I turned onto Sycamore and slowed without meaning to, the way I always did when I came to the shop from this direction. I liked seeing it from the street. I liked imagining how it looked to people who didn’t know it the way I did—just a bookshop on a corner, lit warm against the dark, the painted sign above the door catching the light, the window display I’d spent an hour arranging visible through the glass. I’d done it in deep burgundy and gold this week, a stack of mystery novels fanned around a ceramic crow and a scattering of dried leaves I’d collected. A small string of copper lights framed the window, which I’dput up last weekend and which looked, if I was being honest, exactly as good as I’d hoped. Three ceramic pumpkins sat along the window ledge—cream, rust, and deep green—each with a flameless candle glowing inside, steady and warm and visible from the street in a way that made the whole corner look like somewhere worth stopping.
I sat at the corner for a second longer than the empty road required, just looking at it. Then I turned into the alley and pulled into my reserved spot behind the building. I grabbed my bag, locked the car, and headed for the back door, already feeling the shift from town to home.
The apartment above the shop had its own smell, one I’d never been able to replicate anywhere else. All old books and steeped tea, paper and ink softened by something sweet. Vanilla, mostly. I’d baked shortbread earlier in the afternoon, and the scent still clung to the air, mixing with the cinnamon candle I’d lit that morning and forgotten to blow out, which had burned itself down to a nub on the kitchen windowsill and filled the whole apartment with the smell of autumn and mild irresponsibility. I nudged my glasses higher on my nose as I stepped fully inside, breathing it in, letting the familiar quiet wrap around me.
Three small shapes emerged from the shadows almost immediately. Darcy stretched languidly from the back of the couch, Knightley circled my ankles with quiet devotion, and Wentworth announced himself with a meow that suggested I was late and that he was deeply concerned about my well-being. To everyone else, they looked identical—sleek, inky silhouettes—but I’d never once confused them. Darcy’s aloofness, Knightley’s calm steadiness, Wentworth’s dramatic neediness. I’d learned their differences the way you learn a language: by paying attention. I’d found them a couple of years ago in the alley behind the shop, three scrawny kittens tucked into a cardboardbox that some jackass had dumped there. I’d brought them upstairs just for the night, brewed a cup of tea, cleaned them up and fed them, and after a few minutes in their company they became mine, and I became theirs, and I never once considered any other ending. Now they followed me through the apartment like shadows with opinions, a quiet reminder that staying, that choosing to love something, could turn into something permanent and wonderful if you let it.
“I know,” I murmured. “Long day. I missed you, too.”
I kicked off my shoes, set my bag down, and filled a glass of water, letting the quiet seep back into my bones.
Sweetbriar High came back to me without permission as I changed into pajamas and curled up on the couch, the day finally loosening its grip. Jasper had been two years ahead of me. A senior when I was a sophomore, quiet in a way that most people read as intimidating, but I had never once found him threatening. He had a reputation that made teachers watch him—not because he was cruel or loud, but because there was always the sense of something unresolved in him. He kept to himself. In the hallways he moved through crowds like he was somewhere else already, and nobody seemed to quite know what to do with that.
I’d volunteered to tutor him in English because his grade was slipping and because I had, with the complete transparency of a fifteen-year-old who thought she was being subtle, wanted to sit across from him because he was hot and mysterious and reminded me of all the heroes in all the books that I constantly had my nose buried in.
In the first session, he showed up six minutes late and dropped into the chair like he wasn’t sure he was going to stay. Bag at his feet, arms crossed loosely, wearing that expression I’d already cataloged from a distance—not hostile, just waiting to beconfirmed in his suspicion that this was going to be a waste of his time.
“We’re startingJane Eyre,” I said.
He looked at the book. Then at me. “The Brontë one?”
“Exactly. One of my favorites. Also, you have a paper due on it.”
He picked it up, turned it over, and set it back down. “Great.”
He wasn’t being sarcastic, exactly. It was flatter than sarcasm—more like he was filing the information away without committing to a feeling about it. I started explaining the context, the narrative, the thing Brontë was doing structurally that made the ending resonate—the way Jane refused to compromise herself even when everything she wanted was on the other side of that compromise. I expected him to zone out within three minutes. Instead, about halfway through my explanation, he leaned forward slightly and said, “Wait. Say that again.”
I did.
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the cover. “So the whole thing is about a woman who could have everything she wants, but she won’t take it on terms that cost her who she is. Even when it would be easier to just—” he paused, “—give in.”
I blinked. “More or less.”
“It sounded bleak at first,” he said. “But actually—” He stopped, like he hadn’t expected to have an opinion and was slightly annoyed to find that he did. “That’s something.” He turned the book over again. “The wife in the attic, though. That part’s bleak as hell.”
“That part,” I agreed, “is extremely bleak. You are correct.”
“Does it end badly for her?”
I looked at him. “It ends badly for her.”
He nodded slowly, like he was filing that away too, in a different place from the rest of it. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll read it.”
He didn’t smile much. But that afternoon, toward the end of the hour, when we’d been talking about the moment Jane leaves Thornfield—the way she walks away from everything she wants because staying would mean becoming someone she couldn’t live with—he’d looked up at me with something shifting behind his expression, a recognition he hadn’t been expecting, and said, “You really do love this book.”
I hadn’t been prepared for the observation. The fact that he’d been watching me closely enough to notice. “I do,” I admitted.
“It shows.” He picked up his bag to leave, then paused. “She’s not wrong to go, is she? Even though it costs her everything.”
“That’s what I think,” I said. “What do you become if you compromise your ideals?”
“Yeah. She would have lost everything by staying too.” He looked at the book one more time, then at me, with an expression I didn’t quite know what to do with. “Okay. You make it easy to like this stuff.” He said it simply. Not a compliment designed to flatter me, just a statement of fact.
And then he was gone, and I sat there in the library with the fluorescent lights humming above me, feeling quietly, privately undone.
That was how it went. Session after session. He’d arrive—sometimes late, never apologetic about it—and settle in with that contained curiosity that made the space between us feel smaller than it had any business being. He’d surprised me. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. Dry observations about the texts. Moments where his attention sharpened into something entirely focused, those dark eyes fixed on me like what I was saying actually mattered. He was different in that library than he was anywhere else in the building, and I was acutely, helplessly aware that I might be the reason.
