“Well, I was thinking. You’re going to have a lot of time free.” She glanced at Jenny. “And I figure you’re going to be in the area. So I was wondering if you’d like a job?”

I blinked, then looked around the shop.

“You mean here?”

“Let me show you how to work the register,” she said quickly.

* * *

My mother was pleased that I’d found a part-time job to occupy my time.

“In a bookshop too!” she said.

I might have expected my father to be happy as well, but I’d long since given up hope of impressing him, and if anything the bookshop part of the equation—and a secondhand one, at that—seemed to be worthy of even greater disdain than usual. But rather than being discouraged, I found myself quietly emboldened. It felt like working in Johnson & Ross somehow brought me closer to my dream.

When the holidays began, I helped Marie three days a week, and once I’d mastered the register I found the work rewarding. There were shelves to be organized, boxes to be packed and unloaded, and regular customers to begin to get to know. Marie was far less provocative without Jenny around to tease. She showed me some of the more expensive books in the shop, and even began to teach me how to recognize what might be a valuable edition myself. I liked her more and more. And Jenny had been right: Marie was full of stories. She was like a walking repository of the area’s history, and not a day went by when she didn’t regale me with some wild local tale.

Late at night, after my parents had gone to bed, I continued to attempt writing tales of my own. It was hard. While I wasn’t short of ideas, the problem came when I sat down at my desk and attempted to put them into words. Marie was a natural storyteller, and I suspected that Jenny was too. But not me. Ideas that felt good in my head came out flat and lifeless on paper. I started a lot, and finished nothing.

The rest of the time, I spent with Jenny.

The strength of my feelings for her frightened me. It was strange to think that at the beginning of the school year I’d barely noticed her at all. Now I could hardly stop thinking about her. My heart beat oddly, as though my pulse had been taking secret classes and learning fresh and unfamiliar tricks. When we weren’t at her house, we walked slowly around the streets of her part of Gritten. She showed me the park she’d played in as a little girl, the shops she remembered that weren’t there anymore. On one level it was all inconsequential, but the intimacy rendered each detail vivid and special. The weather was hot and bright, and I suddenly found myself noticing color everywhere. Summer was coming. A world that had previously been drab and gray was growing more vibrant by the day.

And I didn’t see Charlie or Billy or James at all.

All these years later, when I first saw Jenny upon returning to Gritten, she reminded me there were good memories for me here as well as bad ones. That was true. All of them were here, as I fell in love for the first time. The three weeks at the beginning of that holiday are the happiest of my whole life.

It was in the fourth that everything went wrong.

TWENTY-EIGHT

NOW

Walking into Johnson & Ross again after all these years brought an almost overwhelming explosion of recognition.

The exterior might have been rejuvenated, but so little had changed inside. The shelves and cabinets were all filled with books, many of them so old and worn that it was easy to believe they were the same ones that had been here back then. The smell and the atmosphere were exactly as I remembered. Every sensation was so intense that I recalled my first visit here, and how it had felt like coming home, and for a moment I wondered if that could have been some impossible flash-forward from then to now. A buried memory emerging not from the past but the future.

I made my way a little unsteadily down the aisle.

There was nobody at the counter. As I glanced around and listened, there didn’t seem to be any other customers in the shop either. It had often been like that when I’d worked here. In less busy moments that summer, I would just sit quietly, breathing in the books. There had been times when it felt like I could hear the pages around me rustling slightly, as though the stories within were shuffling softly in their sleep.

Marie couldn’t still be here, could she?

I didn’t know which answer to that question made me more apprehensive. That she had moved on, or that I might be about to see her again after all this time.

How would either of those make me feel?

A noise from the back of the shop.

“Be right there,” a woman’s voice called. “Bear with me.”

My heart began beating faster. It’s not too late, I thought; even now, I could turn around and be out of here before she appeared. But I forced myself to wait. Finally, she emerged from between the stacks. She was visibly older—that bleached blond hair cut short, and now naturally white—and she was walking a little awkwardly, but to my eyes she was as unchanged as the shop itself.

Marie wasn’t expecting to see me, of course, so there were a couple of seconds when she peered at me blankly, perhaps thrown by the intensity with which I was looking back at her. But then she recognized me, and she broke out in a smile that sent the crinkles at the corners of her eyes flaring wider.

“Paul.”

She walked over slowly, then hugged me.

How was it going to feel to see her after all this time?

Again, it was like coming home.

* * *

Marie turned over the sign in the door to CLOSED, then made us both coffee in the small kitchen area behind the counter.

“There’s no cake, I’m afraid.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

“No. But it certainly looks like you could do with the coffee.”

Did I? I still felt tired from this morning, but I hadn’t realized how obvious it was. Maybe that was another reason the police had thought I was losing my grip on things.

“I’ve not been sleeping well.”

“Understandably. It can’t be easy.”

“I’m glad you’re still here,” I said.

“That’s not easy either. I’ve hung on for as long as I can. I don’t think I’ve got much left in me, though.”

“I don’t believe that for one second.”

She smiled, then blew on her coffee and took a sip.

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother, Paul. She’s a lovely woman.”

That surprised me. “You know her?”

“A little. Not well, but she used to come in here quite a lot.”

I thought about that.

“It seems like she’d become quite a reader.”

“After your father died. Yes.”

I nodded to myself.

My father had been tough and unforgiving, a man who worked the land when the jobs were there, but always seemed more proud of the way the land worked him, as though hardness achieved through suffering were something to covet. Books had never made sense to him—and so neither had I, his quiet, bookish son, always squirreled away upstairs, lost in the stories of others or fumbling to create tales of his own.

I remembered the photograph I’d seen of my mother as a child, lying in the sunlit grass with a book open before her. And I found it easy to picture her, freed from my father’s disapproval, finally pursuing a suppressed passion for reading. It might have been a comforting image, but instead I thought of a lonely woman, desperate for contact, searching for solace and connection in the only places she could find them, and a tremendous surge of guilt went through me that I had not been one of them.