Page 17 of Fate, Interrupted

I get through the rest of the afternoon, but my concentration isn’t worth much. It moves around me. The work is there, but I’m three miles away.

The warehouse empties in the slow incremental way it does at the end of every day. Equipment shuts down in sequence. Voices move toward the parking lot. The dock doors come down with their heavy final sound. I lock the dispatch office and walk out through the side door.

The evening air has dropped maybe three degrees since the afternoon. In July that qualifies as a concession. The sun is low enough to throw long shadows across the parking lot.

I get in my truck and sit with my hands on the wheel. I don’t turn the key. For a moment the only sound is the parking lot around me: a van door somewhere, someone calling across the yard, the outer blocks of Larkin beyond the fence line.

Two visits. Two conversations. A tome of a book I didn’t need and a cup of tea I don’t recall asking for. My wolf has decided. I’m the one still pretending otherwise.

The key turns. The engine roars to life. I pull out of the lot and into the amber evening, and I don’t make a conscious decision about the route so much as I notice, six minutes later, that I’m on Norwood Street, moving past the drab brown door and the small shingle above it at a speed that qualifies as stalker-esque.

The shop is dark. She’s gone.

Tomorrow is Saturday. The Last Chapter is open on Saturdays. I know that because I checked.

I keep driving.

But I noted it. I came this way even though I didn’t need to.

That is enough of that.

Wolves know their mates before their minds do. I know this. I’ve known it my whole life. I’m not ready to call Norah mine when she doesn’t know any of this yet.

Chapter six

Norah

Saturday is a good day.

Thirty-five books sold—a personal record for a non-holiday weekend. I’m choosing to focus on this exclusively and not spend forty minutes reorganizing an end cap of new releases requiring me to move approximately every book in it and then half of them back.

I used to love merchandising. Figuring out what arrangements, color combinations, and signage sent the neurons firing in customer’s brains. How to trigger that impulse buy nerve. It was a game, and it was fun. Lately, it feels like another job to finish before I can go home. When did it become that?

I also finally tackled the shelf signs in the back corner, the ones I’d been writing in pencil for three months because I couldn’t commit to the phrasing. Embarrassing for someone whose job is largely about words. Used a calligraphy marker this time. I stand back and admire my handiwork. They’re good, but I’m not as pleased as I usually am. I’m bored, and I need to be honest about it.

The good thing about Saturdays is that they run me. Literally, up one aisle and down the other. Browsers who want recommendations, a woman who needs something for her book club that isn’t depressing but also isn’t boring, a narrower category than you’d think. A sweet kid with a moon-shaped face who wants the third book in a series we don’t have, and whose face when I find it on the back-order system makes the ten minutes worth it. Mr. Clancy at three forty-five, right on schedule, choosing another legal thriller since he’s already done with the new Grisham.

A good day. A full day. I lock up at six and walk home and do not think about Silas Coulter at all.

Okay, twice. I think about him twice. Both times I redirect immediately and with considerable force, counting them both as a success.

My weekends are predictable. Saturday mornings, while Mark and Jesse man the shop, I go to the farmers market. But only from April through October. Late fall through early spring, I concentrate on whatever DIY project has inspired me. Mosaic lampshades, crewel pillows, painted furniture. Whatever keeps me occupied when the weather is dicey, as it often is in those months.

But the farmer’s market is where my heart and spirits get a lift. Tomatoes, because I keep telling myself I’m going to start cooking real food and tomatoes are the opening commitment to that intention. Sunflowers for the shop counter because sunflowers are happy and happy people buy books. And because they’re my favorite. A candle from the woman with the hand-poured ones, cedar this time, with a smoky, warmer note under the cedar that I hold up to smell a second time before I put it in my bag.

The market is the thing it always is on a Saturday—unhurried and loud in a pleasant way, full of people who are not in a hurry to be anywhere other than here. I move through it with a coffee from the stand near the entrance and the contentment of someone who has built a life with room in it for Saturday morning farmers markets.

This is a good life.

I built it on purpose. I left the fluorescent lighting and the motivational signage, and I came to Larkin, and I met my silent partner Abigail, found this building for rent, and I built The Last Chapter out of stubbornness and a genuine belief that a bookshop done right is worth the risk. Three years later it exists, it employs people, and it is mine in every way that counts.

The life fits.

I didn’t always know it would. When I left the corporate job and quarterly targets dressed up as purpose, I told myself it was a calculated risk. The kind of thing people do in their early thirties when they’ve saved enough and are finally honest enough to admit that the version of themselves they’ve been living is not the version they actually want to be.

What I didn’t tell myself, because I wasn’t ready to hear it, was that I was lonely in that corporate life. Lonely in the way of a person who has arranged their existence so efficiently around productivity that there is no room left in it for the unplanned or the serendipitous. No room for the stranger who comes in looking for something they can’t name and leaves with what they had no intention of buying.

The Last Chapter fixed a lot of that.