Page 3 of Owl’s Cherished Mate

The laptop on the kitchen table caught my eye. It was old—the kind of old where the battery lasted maybe forty minutes if I was lucky, and the fan sounded like a jet engine. It still worked, though. That was all that mattered.

I checked the clock on the microwave. Two forty-five. The library closed at seven. If I left now, I had plenty of time to get a few solid hours of studying in before I had to come back and figure out dinner.

I’d switched to online classes a month after coming back—community college courses I could take at my own pace. It wasn’t the degree I’d been working toward at State, but it was something. A thread I refused to let go of. The only real problem was the lack of internet. We didn’t have it at the house. Dad had never bothered, and I couldn’t justify the monthly cost when I was already stretching every dollar to cover groceries, utilities, and Lawson’s school supplies he never seemed to use.

So I went to the library. Every day after my shift, I sat at the same corner table, plugged in my dying laptop, and connected to the free Wi-Fi. It was the only time during the day that felt like mine. Two, sometimes three hours where I wasn’t Lawson’s guardian, Gravis Williams’s daughter, or the girl everyone in town whispered about.

At the library, I was just a woman with a laptop and a plan to get out of here someday.

I grabbed the laptop, shoved it into my bag, and slung the strap over my shoulder. Pausing outside Lawson’s door, I listened. The music was still playing at full blast.

“I’m heading to the library,” I called through the door. “I’ll be back by seven thirty. I’ll figure something out for dinner when I get back.”

No response.

“Lawson?”

“Yeah. Heard you.”

I waited for something more. A goodbye, an okay, anything. It didn’t come.

My hand hovered near the doorknob. I could open it. I could sit on his floor and refuse to leave until he talked to me. I could demand answers about why he smelled like weed, why he’d ditched school, and where he was last Thursday night when the tracking app showed him halfway across town at an address I didn’t recognize. I didn’t, though.

I didn’t have the fight in me right now.

Tomorrow, I told myself. I’d push harder for answers tomorrow.

I dropped my hand from the knob and walked away. Then I climbed into my car and drove to the library.

2

GRAY

The spine was coming apart.

I ran my thumb along the cracked leather, feeling where the threads had loosened and the binding had started to separate from the text block. It was a first edition from the 1940s—nothing rare enough to be valuable, but old enough to deserve better than falling apart on a shelf. I’d been working on it for three days, regluing the sections with PVA adhesive and letting each one dry before moving to the next. It was a slow process, but it was the kind of work my owl preferred.

The library was quiet, the way it usually was on a weekday afternoon. A couple of high schoolers were camped out at a table near the windows, supposedly studying but mostly on their phones. An older man I recognized as one of the retired fishermen in town sat in the armchair by the periodicals, reading the same newspaper he’d been reading for an hour. Mrs. Pike was at the circulation desk beside me, scanning in returned books.

“It’s almost three,” she said, glancing at the clock on the wall behind us.

“Mm-hmm.” I didn’t look up from the spine.

“Your friend should be here any minute.”

That made me look up. “She’s not my friend.”

Mrs. Pike’s lips twitched. “Of course she is.”

I went back to repairing the book in front of me, and Mrs. Pike went back to scanning. Neither of us said anything else, but I could feel her amusement radiating off her.

I glanced at the clock and then back to the book. The woman did come in almost every day at about this time. She sat at the same corner table, too. The one with the outlet that actually worked. She’d plug in her dinosaur of a laptop and disappear into whatever she was working on until close to seven.

My owl had noticed her the first day she came in.

I’d been shelving returns in the back when I heard the door, and by the time I came around the corner, she was already settled at the corner table with her head down. There was nothing remarkable about her coming in and sitting down with her laptop. People came and went doing the same all day.

My owl had gone still, though.