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“I’m sorry,” Wren says, hand to his heart. “How devastating.”

“It happened so fast.” I find myself telling him about the Irish friends, the gig at the bar, the nurse on the sidewalk, the phone call. I can’t believe I’m vomiting up all this personal information. Thankfully, Wren listens without comment.

“I was wrecked, after.” I take a ragged breath. “Am wrecked, still, obviously, but lockdown in my apartment was intolerable.”

“I was in the city, too,” he says. “It’s hard, I know.”

“When I saw this listing—well, it didn’t make much sense, moving up here and buying a business, but in the moment, it felt like the only way to save myself.”

“Sometimes saving yourself is all you can do,” Wren says. “Sensible or not, you’ve got yourself a beautiful place.”

I follow Wren’s gaze past the wildflower field and out toward the green pond. Blue mountains on the far side of the valley waver like watercolors. “It is gorgeous, isn’t it? Like a stage backdrop.”

“That’s what I do,” Wren says. “Or did.”

The change of subject is a gift. “Did what?”

“Set design, on Broadway.” He doesn’t need to tell me Manhattan’s theaters have all gone dark, the thousands whose work it was to put on their shows now unemployed. “How about you? Were you a bookseller in the city?”

“A book writer, actually. I taught creative writing, too.” Wren’s impressed when I name the college but admits he’s never heard of Dad’s Apprentice.

“I’ll have to order a copy,” he says kindly. He takes another sip of his latte. “This really is delicious. It’s a smart idea to start up a café.”

I scoff. “There’s no café. That’s just from my kitchen.”

“Well, it tastes better than Starbucks.” He drinks some more and smiles.

“Did you come home to Schuywich after the shutdown?” I ask.

“It’s been decades since I thought of this place as home, but as long as I had a house here, it seemed stupid to stay in the city.”

“How is it so many New Yorkers just happen to have extra houses upstate?”

“I know, right?” Wren’s eyebrows and shoulders rise in tandem. “Makes me sound like a spoiled one percenter, though that’s far from the truth. Believe me, the last thing I wanted to own was my mother’s house in Schuywich, but she transferred the deed into my name a couple of years ago. She said it was so the government couldn’t seize it to pay off her Medicaid debts after she died. I told her I didn’t think it worked like that, but once she got the notion in her head, it was impossible to change her mind.”

Picking up on his use of the past tense, I gently ask, “Is she still with us?”

“My mother? Oh, yes. She’s in her recliner right now, smoking her tenth cigarette of the day and watching Fox News at full volume. You can’t imagine how desperate I am to get out of that house. I was going down to the village co-op for groceries when I saw it was June first, the day Miss Cabot always opened Red Barn Books for the summer, so I drove out here.”

“What was she like?”

“Evelyn Cabot? Oh, she was a force of nature.” Wren smiles. “She had this confidence about her, like she wasn’t afraid of anything. She was very opinionated, politically, and not at all religious, but somehow she got along with everyone no matter what they believed in. She was the only adult who never gave me a hard time about preferring books and art to hunting and sports. She couldn’t have guessed I was gay—I hardly knew it myself until I got to the city—but it meant a lot to me, growing up, to be understood that way. Oh, and she was a writer, too.”

“Really?” That’s something Rhonda never mentioned.

Wren nods. “Magazine articles, mostly. The bookshop was her main business, but she’d go down to the city sometimes for meetings with her editor, which I thought sounded pretty important. She never made a big deal about it, though.”

“Which magazine?”

“Something for women, I don’t remember. Glamour, maybe? Anyway, I think she’d like that Red Barn Books belongs to another writer.”

“Do you remember much about how she ran the shop? I haven’t found any kind of inventory.”

“Inventory was Miss Cabot’s Achilles’ heel. She had all these spiral notebooks where she’d write things down in shorthand, I think? Whatever it was, no one could make sense of it but her.” He looks up, searching the sky for traces of memory. “I helped her with that, one summer. You should look for a box of typed index cards, maybe in the back room where she kept the naughty books.”

“Naughty books?” I laugh. “What, like porn?”

“It seemed like that to me at the time,” Wren says, blushing. “No, they were just pulp fiction paperbacks. I snuck one home once, out of curiosity, but it wasn’t for me. My mother found it and demanded to know where I got such a ‘naughty book.’ I said it was from the boys’ locker room at school. I got the feeling she was secretly relieved I was reading a book with buxom women on the cover. God, I haven’t thought about this in years.”