Chapter 4
Ellie
Jo fed him.
I knew she would.
I had tried to stop her, not because I thought it would work, but because stopping Jo is essentially like stopping gravity—technically possible in theory, completely pointless in practice—but I had assumed she'd get him to sign the lease, hand him a mug of tea, and send him upstairs.
I was wrong.
I was shelving books—Travel section, which is always a mess because people pick books up, put them somewhere else, and then feel guilty but not guilty enough to put them back properly—when I heard them talking about three things: the lease, Wren Falls weather, and something I couldn't hear because Noah's voice was so quiet that only the tone carried, not the words.
Jo's voice always carried.
Jo's voice is the voice of a woman who assumes that whatever she's saying is important and is always correct in that assumption.
I paused while shelving.
"Ellie will leave you alone," Jo said. "She's good at that."
I put a book on the shelf.
"She's also had a complicated relationship with this particular corner of the literary world."
I shelved another book.
Then I stopped and looked at the shelf and thought about that sentence.
Complicated relationship.
Three years. One form letter. Four sentences. A manuscript now buried in the seventh layer of folders on my laptop like something I had tried to bury properly but couldn't delete because deleting is accepting, and I had decided that I had already accepted it and didn't need to accept it again.
Complicated is a word people use when they don't want to say painful.
I finished the Travel section. Moved to Fiction. Kept working.
He left an hour later.
I heard his footsteps—up the stairs, straight to the apartment, no hesitation—and then that silence that sounds different from productive writing and this one sounded exactly like productive writing and I didn't think about it.
Jo came over to the counter and looked at me with an expression I couldn't comment on because she was both my boss and one of my closest friends, and in certain situations that combination is difficult.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing," she said.
"Jo."
"Ellie."
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
"I only told him that you have a complicated relationship with the literary world," she said, in the tone that implied this was obviously fine and any disagreement from me would be unreasonable. "Nothing specific. Just context."
"He didn't ask for context."
"People don't always ask for what they need."
"Jo—"
"He seems okay," she said, as if the conversation had naturally moved in that direction. "Tired. Something else too. But okay."
"I don't care if he's okay."
"Hmm," Jo said.
I knew the different dialects of Jo's hmm.
This one meant: I hear you and I disagree but I'm going to let you believe I'm neutral.
"He's living here," I said. "That doesn't mean we're friends. It means he lives upstairs and I work downstairs and we both mind our own business."
"Absolutely," Jo said.
"And giving him context about me wasn't appropriate."
"You're right."
"And I'm glad you fed him, but this needs to be a one-time thing, Jo, otherwise he'll—"
"Ellie."
She squeezed my hand briefly.
"I know."
I stopped.
Jo knew me in a way that was sometimes almost unbearable—she knew the things I said and the things I didn't say.
We'd worked together for three years, and before that too, technically, because I had first worked in this bookshop when I was seventeen and Jo had hired me not because I had experience but because I had put a book on the wrong shelf and then corrected it myself without being asked.
"Someone who automatically fixes things," she had said, "belongs here."
I belonged.
I never left.
This place was more home than anywhere I had ever lived.
And now Noah Calloway was going to be living in the apartment upstairs for three months.
"Fine," I said.
"Fine," Jo repeated cheerfully.
"This does not make me happy."
"I know."
"I'm simply accepting the situation."
"Absolutely."
I gave her one last look that contained everything I wanted to say but wasn't saying.
She received it with the serenity of someone who had made peace with being right about most things.
I went back to work.
He came downstairs at three.
I was at the register processing a transaction for a customer—a regular named Margaret, who came in every week and always bought one mystery and one nonfiction book and always claimed the nonfiction was for actual work and the mystery was for relaxation—when I heard the back door and footsteps heading toward the kitchen.
Margaret left.
The shop emptied.
I pulled up the inventory screen and focused on it.
He came out of the kitchen holding a mug and this time he didn't stop. He went directly to the Travel section near the front door and started browsing.
Actually browsing, I noticed.
Reading spines. Picking one up, checking the back, putting it back. Picking up another.
"That section was reorganized earlier," I said without looking away from the screen. "If you're looking for something specific, let me know."
"Just browsing," he said.
"We generally ask customers to put books back where they found them."
"Am I a customer?"
"You're a resident."
I looked up from the screen.
"Which technically isn't even in the customer category. Which means you're more responsible for putting books back, not less."
He returned the book he was holding—exactly where it belonged, I noticed, which was irritating—and walked toward the counter.
"Jo told me," He said, "that you've been here for years."
"Jo tells people a lot of things."
"Is it not true?"
"It's true," I said. "What I'm pointing out is that she shared information about me with you without asking me first, which—"
"You shared information about me last night," he said. "You searched my name online."
I looked at him.
He was looking at me with that expression I still couldn't quite read.
Direct.
A little wary.
Something else underneath it that I wasn't specifically looking at.
"I saw your author photo," I said. "To confirm that you were who you claimed to be. That's basic diligence."
"And?"
"And what?"
"The agency," he said.
Simply.
No build-up. No softening.
"You asked about it last night. You had a reason."
The room was quiet.
Outside, someone walked past on the sidewalk—boots, maybe a kid, quick uneven steps. A car.
Then quiet again.
I made a decision.
"Three years ago," I said in the same tone I used to discuss inventory updates, "I submitted a manuscript to Calloway Literary Agency."
He didn't say anything.
"I got a form rejection. Four sentences. Unsigned."
I looked at my screen.
"It's not relevant because it happened three years ago and I've moved on. I'm only explaining why I knew the agency's name."
Silence.
I stared at the screen—an invoice I clearly wasn't processing because the numbers were blurring a little—and waited for him to say something.
An apology.
An explanation.
Anything I could easily dismiss so we could both go our separate ways.
He said, "How many words?"
I looked up.
"What?"
"The manuscript," he said. "How many words?"
That was not the question I had expected.
"Eighty-one thousand."
"Genre?"
"Literary fiction."
Pause.
"With some romance. Hybrid. Agents don't usually like that."
"How long did it take?"
"Three years."
Something shifted across his face.
So subtle that I wasn't sure whether I had seen it or imagined it.
"And then you stopped writing," he said.
It wasn't a question.
"When did I say that?"
"You didn't."
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
And this time I saw the thing I had been avoiding.
The tiredness beneath the surface, yes.
But something else underneath that.
Something that recognized it.
Something that knew exactly what I was describing because he had been there too.
No.
I looked back at the screen.
"The shop closes at five on Wednesdays," I said. "One hour."
A long silence.
"Okay," he said.
He went back to the Travel section.
Picked out a book—actually picked it out, held it for a minute as if making a decision—and then brought it to the counter and set down a twenty-dollar bill.
I looked at the book.
Letters to No One: A Poet's Private Correspondence, 1951–1963.
The exact same title.
A second copy.
New.
Uncracked spine.
"Yours looks more read," he said.
"It is."
"I think starting with the uncracked one is probably fair."
I counted out his change.
He took it.
Didn't say much else—which, surprisingly, was difficult to resist, considering what Sara Jo had said—and headed back toward the stairs.
He stopped before the third step.
I had no idea it was this audible.
"Ellie," he said without turning around.
"Yeah."
"Form rejections are unsigned because they're pre-written. Nobody writes them personally."
Pause.
"That doesn't mean nobody read it."
Then he left.
The step creaked.
The door upstairs closed.
I stood behind the counter.
Four sentences.
Three years.
One creaking step.
I looked back at my screen and processed the invoice and told myself, clearly and firmly, that this meant absolutely nothing.
Jo's hmm feeling sat in my chest.
I ignored it.
At seven, when I closed the shop, turned off the lights, and put on my coat, I noticed the lights upstairs were still on.
And if I paused for a second and listened—which I didn't, or did but only accidentally—I could hear the sound of a keyboard.
He was writing.
I went home.
Didn't think about it much.