Chapter 18
I'm also trying not to count how many people walk in during the first hour like that number is going to tell me whether we make it through the month.
The first customer through the door is Mrs. Okafor, who has been coming in since my father owned the bookstore. "Avery," she says the second she sees me, one hand pressed dramatically to her chest. "Thank God that pop-up was not permanent."
I laugh before I can help it. "Mrs. Okafor, I haven't even had enough coffee yet to survive emotional ambushes."
"I'm serious." She reaches across the counter to squeeze my hand. "I'm happy you're back where you belong, sweetheart. I wanted to come support you properly."
Something in my chest loosens a little more. "Thank you."
She nods like that's settled and heads straight for Cry About It without breaking stride. The second and third customers arrive together, a couple I don't recognize who move slowly through the front table display, touching things. Browsers, and there is a particular relief in them.
I arrange some hardcovers on the counter and a guy at the register lifts one halfway out of the stack. "Is this the sequel or the first one?" he asks. I turn it over for him, point to the tiny “Book One” on the spine.
"I'll take it." He nods like I’ve solved something larger than a reading order while I ring him up.
The store smells right. That’s the first thing I clock, and it shouldn’t matter this much, but it does. The pop-up smelled like someone else’s shelves and floor.
This morning my bookstore smells like dark roast coffee, paperbacks, and a faint thread of harbor air. I stand in the middle of it and breathe until my shoulders finally come down.
"You're doing this thing," Cordelia says from behind the bar,
"If this sentence ends with me crying before ten in the morning, I'm legally allowed to ask you to leave," I tell her.
Cordelia ignores that completely. "You're standing there like you're trying to absorb the building through your sternum."
"That's called reopening a business."
"That's extremely normal after the very extraordinary month you've had." She slides a cup of coffee across the bar in my direction. "Drink this and let me do things."
She means the floor and running the opening with cheerful efficiency.
Within forty minutes since I unlocked the door, she's sold two copies of a memoir that had been sitting on the midlist shelf since February by describing it as "the book you read when you realize you've been politely furious for twenty years.
" The women looked at the cover for four seconds and bought copies.
I drink my coffee and let her do it.
Pancake is installed on the small dog bed we placed on the rug near the couches, which she accepted after a brief period of skeptical circling, and is currently supervising the floor. Callum is in the back room, where he went twenty minutes ago to supervise the restoration crew.
By ten o'clock the store has seventeen people in it and my chest relaxes as the store is running the way it did before a city inspector walked through the door with a clipboard and the whole month went sideways.
Mrs. Okafor comes to the counter with three novels and a request that I put the fourth on hold when it arrives in trade paperback, which she could have done by phone, but she came in to do it in person.
"Good to have you back where you belong," she says.
"Good to be back," I say, and mean it completely.
The morning moves while Cordelia runs the floor.
I work the register, the brew bar, and the floor simultaneously in the way you learn to do when you are one person operating a business.
Except I'm not one person today, and every time I remember that it lands like something I haven't finished getting used to yet.
I put a Help Wanted sign in the window this morning and taped it to the inside of the glass. I've been operating under-staffed for years because I'd gotten used to doing most of the work myself. Plus, Shane always said yes when I needed an extra shift and I let that be enough.
"You know this is insane, right?" I said last week while Callum stood in the back room with dust in the air and half the shelves stripped, that I was running a business like it was a favor I was doing for everyone else instead of something that had to survive.
I argued with him about it for ten minutes and then he hired a remediation crew the same afternoon.
The sign went up because of that conversation and everything that came after it, because I've stopped confusing things I can do alone with things that make sense to do alone, and because relying on one person who is not here anymore is not a plan. That distinction has taken me longer to realize.
In the early afternoon, a woman named Beatriz comes to the counter, taps the Help Wanted sign with one finger, and says, "If you’re serious about that, you should fix your front table first."
"Wow," I say. "Interesting choice to insult the business before applying to work here."
She's been in the store before. I know her face the way I know some of my regulars, from repetition rather than conversation. Beatriz comes in every other week to buy mysteries and sometimes sits in the reading nook for an hour before she does.
She says she's between jobs and that she's good with people.
I also notice she has very strong opinions about the book displays, which she demonstrates immediately by looking at the new release table and saying, with complete calm, "the Morales should be face-out."
She may be right. I know that before I turn to look.
I ask her a couple of questions and she answers both immediately, like she's already decided what she wants.
"When can you start?"
"I'm available as soon as you need me."
"Then tomorrow it is," I say. Then, because apparently reopening the store has activated the part of my brain that makes reckless decisions with confidence, I add, "This feels either very healthy or exactly how people wake up three months from now wondering why they trusted a stranger who judged their front table. "
She says yes, and that's the entirety of the hiring process, which is both very efficient and extremely impulsive.
I have her fill out employment documents, then she goes back to browsing and eventually buys the Morales book from the display. I watch her leave and feel something like relief.
I'm not managing a situation or waiting to see what happens next. I'm choosing the hire, the reopening, and the fact that Callum has carried half the weight of the last six weeks without being asked to, and that I want him to keep doing it, which is the harder thing to admit than I expected.
Trusting people hasn't protected me from being wrong. It just meant being willing to choose anyway.
Cordelia appears at my elbow at lunchtime with a sandwich from the place two blocks over that she walked to get without telling me and hands it to me without commentary. I eat it standing at the counter between customers and feel the day settle into its rhythm.
The afternoon settles into a comfortable pace, the kind that lets me stock shelves while having actual conversations instead of just completing transactions.
I shelve a new poetry collection while explaining the store's organizational logic to a tourist who seems genuinely interested.
I order two additional copies of the memoir Cordelia sold because we're down to one and she shows no signs of stopping.
I catch myself rearranging the Fall in Love, You Coward table.
Callum emerges from the back room after 2:00 and refills his coffee at the bar. He says something low to Cordelia that makes her point at him approvingly. I catch the words, “pressure test passed.” Then he settles into the reading nook with Pancake across his feet and his phone in his hand.
Cordelia leaves at 5:50, stopping to hug me in the doorway in a way that communicates more than she's going to say out loud, which is how most of the important things between us get communicated.
The last customer lingers a few minutes longer, finishes flipping through a paperback by the front table, pays, and heads out with a quick thank you that echoes a little in the quiet.
Callum hands me the last stack from the counter and I take it without looking, already moving to the shelf he’s cleared for me. He reaches past me for the receipt tape at the same time I step back to give him space, and neither of us hesitates or apologizes.
"You’re out," he says, holding up the empty roll like he’s discovered evidence in a crime documentary. "This place is hanging on by a thread, Avery."
"Top drawer," I say, sliding the books into place. "Left side."
He finds it without digging. "Wow," he says. "The legendary left drawer. I honestly thought there'd be a ceremony. Maybe a tiny ribbon cutting for authorized personnel only."
We move around each other, no checking, no second-guessing, just the quiet rhythm of getting things done in the same space without getting in each other’s way.
Pancake gets her leash, but the long end trails behind her as she turns in a slow circle and drags it across the floor, catching on the leg of the front table.
I bend to free it, fingers working the loop loose while she huffs at me like I’ve created the problem.
The lights go down to the overnight setting and I'm reaching for my keys when the motion sensor chimes.
I turn toward it.
The door is open. Shane is standing in it, which is wrong on its face because the sign says closed and the door clicked after I watched Cordelia go through it forty minutes ago.
He's in the same jacket he wore half the days he worked here, and he has his hands visible, palms open at his sides, fingers spread just enough to show he’s empty. They're held there a beat longer than natural like he practiced it in his head before he stepped inside.
His expression doesn’t land as anything I recognize from the last three years, not friendly, not apologetic, not even defensive, just something flat and unreadable that makes it harder, not easier, to understand why he’s here.
For a second I catch the guy who used to cover extra shifts when I was sick, and then he's gone again.
"You need to leave," Callum says from behind me before I can say anything, calm enough that it somehow lands harder.
Shane’s eyes flick past my shoulder. "I know," he says, his voice tight, like he’s out of time. "I just need to talk to Avery."
I'm aware of Callum behind me. A chair leg shifts softly against the floor as he comes forward a fraction, then stills, like he's choosing not to make the first move. I'm also aware of Pancake, who has stopped moving toward the door.
"The store is closed." My grip tightens on the leash and I step a half step forward, putting myself between him and the counter.
"I don't have much time," he says without moving, his voice tight. "Hear me out or this gets worse."