2. Margot
MARGOT
My grandmother left me a bookshop, a cat named Hemingway, and the permanent, low-grade sensation that I am always being read.
Josie ran The Foxed Page for forty years, and she liked to say that a good bookseller reads people faster than they read the spines.
I inherited the shop, the cat, and the trick of it, and somewhere in the year and a half since the funeral the trick turned around to face me.
Now I'm the one who feels read. It follows me up the block and into the stacks, a light pressure between my shoulder blades, the sense that just outside the frame a page is turning, and the page is me.
The shop is one long room the width of a train car, brick down one side and shelves bolted to every surface that will hold them.
It smells like paper going slowly gold at the edges, and if that smell were legal tender I'd be a wealthy woman.
It isn't. Last month I covered the lease with a bad feeling in my stomach and a check I mailed with my eyes shut.
So the timing of my sudden and thoroughly undignified good fortune hasn't been lost on me.
A few weeks ago a woman I will never meet filmed herself sobbing over the last chapter of a novel called The Wolf Who Waited, and the video did the thing videos do when they decide to happen to a person.
The book is mine. The name on the spine belongs to someone else.
I write dark romance as Vera Sablewood, because Margot Ellis hand-sells quiet literary novels to nine loyal regulars, while Vera, it turns out, sells to strangers who weep in parked cars.
Vera is braver than I am. Vera writes men who would burn a city down to keep one woman safe.
I write her because I gave up on the version of that story where I get to be a character inside it instead of the one holding the pen.
My phone hasn't behaved in days. It lights up on the counter with orders from towns I couldn't find on a map, a note from an agent who wants to represent a woman named Vera who does not, strictly speaking, exist, and a producer who keeps calling the book a property, as though it were a parking lot.
I answer all of it as Vera, and I am very good at being her.
It is being Margot that I've let go a little slack.
The strangest part is the attention itself.
People photograph the front window and tag a shop most of them will never stand inside, and the ones who do come in buy the book and ask me, the woman who wrote every word of it, whether I've read it and whether it holds up.
I tell them it's wonderful. I ring them up.
Then I climb the stairs and lie awake being no one in particular.
The bell over the door clangs like a small fire alarm, and Birdie shoulders in backward, hauling a carton of my own book that the distributor overnighted to refill a shelf that emptied in a day.
She's twenty-two and reviews novels to a phone balanced on a cereal box, with the calm certainty of a woman who has never once been wrong at full volume.
"Okay," she says, before hello, before the door has even swung shut. "I did a deep dive last night."
"That's how every true-crime episode opens," I tell her. "The victim never sees it coming."
"I mean your dating history. It isn't technically a crime, though it is arguably a pattern of them.
" She sets the carton on the counter, and Hemingway relocates three inches to the left to file a formal complaint.
Then she wanders to the true-crime aisle, the way she always ends up there, and rests her chin on the top of the shelf like a woman about to read out a verdict.
"Exhibit one is the tennis coach, from two years back." She taps the spine of a paperback about a man with a suspicious garden. "His cause of death is unexplained. He was last seen fleeing your opinions."
"He quoted Hemingway and credited it to Fitzgerald," I say. "I corrected him. He stopped texting. There's nothing unexplained about it. The man simply could not survive being wrong about the Lost Generation."
"Exhibit two is the aquarium date, who talked about his ex in front of the jellyfish until even they looked embarrassed for you."
"In fairness, the jellyfish had nowhere else to be."
"Exhibit three is the architect, the one you actually liked.
" She turns from the shelf, and the fun leaves her voice by a careful degree.
"You went on three dates, and then you told him, and I am quoting the message you sent me at midnight, that it was getting too easy to picture.
You dumped a man for being too promising. "
"That's not a crime either," I say.
"No," she agrees. "That one's just sad. It belongs in a different section entirely." Then she lets the game drop, and when she looks at me over the shelf she isn't performing anymore. "Real question. Do you want to be found, or are you just very good at making sure nobody does?"
I don't have an answer that would survive being said out loud, and my phone saves me from trying, rattling against the counter with the producer's name flashing on the screen. Birdie's whole face lights up like a slot machine paying out.
"Put it on speaker," she whispers. "Be Vera. Do the voice."
I don't have a voice. What I have is a lower register and a talent for lying about my own nerve, which apparently sounds exactly like charm across a phone line. "This is Vera," I say, and it comes out smooth as glass, the voice of a woman who has never once doubted herself.
He talks about vision and heat and something he calls four-quadrant appeal. Then he asks the thing these calls always come back to, his voice dropping as though we are old friends. "Between us, Vera. Where does a woman like you find a man who writes the way you do?"
"I don't go looking," I say. "I make them up. It's cheaper, and they always turn up on time." Behind the register, Birdie has both hands clamped over her mouth, quietly coming apart.
When I hang up, she exhales like a diver breaking the surface. "You are a completely different person on the phone," she says. "It was unsettling. I loved it."
"That's the job," I tell her. "Vera is who I'd be if I believed a single thing she says."
Birdie leaves around noon to chase down oat milk and footage, and the shop settles into the specific hush it only finds when it's just me, the cat, and four thousand books keeping their opinions to themselves. That is when the key catches my eye.
I keep the spare on a brass hook beneath the register, third from the left, always the third, because that's where Josie kept it and I've never had a reason to argue with a dead woman's system.
This morning it hangs on the second. Most people would miss a thing like that, but noticing is the one part of Josie I inherited whole, and I have never learned how to switch it off.
I decide I must have bumped it. I decide a great many convenient things before lunch.
There's also the cup. When I turn around it's waiting at the far end of the counter, lid still seated, from the chain place on the corner I won't set foot in because Mateo two doors down would take it as a personal betrayal.
It is a quarter full and long cold. I didn't buy it.
Birdie drinks something pink and structurally alarming out of a mason jar.
So I stand there holding coffee that nobody who belongs in this shop would ever order, and then I do the sensible thing and drop it in the bin, and I refuse to give it one more second of my attention.
Here's the trouble with writing a man who watches a woman who doesn't know it.
You spend so many hours inside his patience that the patience starts to feel pointed at you, and you lose the thread between instinct and overtime.
I gave Vera's hero a stillness that raises the hair on my arms, and lately it stands up on its own, in the shower, on the walk home, in the half second before I round a corner.
I diagnose myself with an occupational hazard and take two aspirin for a thing that isn't a headache.
Late in the day I say as much to Hemingway, the finest colleague I've ever had, on account of his never once talking back.
"If there's a man out there," I tell him, working the gray velvet behind his ears, "haunting Damen Avenue and memorizing my schedule, I'd like it on the record that the least he could do is come inside and buy a book.
Vera has a print run to earn out. I have a lease to commit felonies over.
Lurking is free. Paperbacks are twelve ninety-nine. "
Hemingway blinks at me with the flat contempt of a creature who has never made a payment in his life, and falls asleep in the middle of my argument. I take it as agreement. I take almost everything as agreement these days, because the shop is quieter when I win.
A regular rescues the afternoon from its own silence.
Mr. Adler comes in near four for his weekly thriller and tells me the ending of last week's before he's fully through the door, as though I don't read the things I sell.
He browses the way a person is supposed to.
He drags a finger along the spines, pulls three books and buys the cheapest, grumbles about the cold, and holds the door a beat too long for the wind.
It is ordinary in every part, and I could have kissed him for it.
The light goes amber and then gray, the way it does when the year starts giving up on its afternoons before I'm ready.
I'm reshelving the last of the returns and murmuring my way down the alphabet when I feel it again.
It gathers at the back of my neck, heavier now and nearer.
I look up, and he is already in the poetry corner, as if he had stood there an hour and I had simply failed to see him.
He's tall enough to make my low ceiling feel like a personal remark, and he stands so still that the shop seems to hold its breath around him.
Everyone who comes in here browses. They wander, they tilt their heads to read the spines sideways, they slide a book halfway out and lose their nerve.
He does none of it. He waits in front of Josie's shelf as though he read every title from the sidewalk and came inside only to collect the one he wanted.
Something in me recognizes him, which makes no sense, because I have never seen this man before in my life.
It isn't his face I know. It is the sensation that arrived with him, the exact weight I have carried all day and half of last night, as though it has finally put on a coat and walked through my door to sit down.
He lifts it down without hunting for it, a slim, foxed hardcover my grandmother loved so fiercely she annotated it in three colors of ink across thirty years.
It is the one book in the shop that was never for sale, because it is the last place her handwriting still lives.
Josie read it the way other people pray, and after she died I could not bring myself to put a price on her margins. I open my mouth to explain all of that.
"That one isn't really for…"
He carries it to the counter before the sentence can finish itself, and something in the way he moves closes my throat around the rest of it.
Up close he smells like cold air and nothing else.
His eyes are dark and unhurried, and they move over my face the way I read a first line, weighing it, deciding whether to trust where it means to go.
"It was my grandmother's favorite," I say instead. It isn't a pitch and it isn't a refusal. It's just the truth, walking out of me without my permission.
He holds my gaze a moment longer than a stranger is allowed to. "Then I'll make sure it gets read," he says, low, like a promise he has already kept.
It happens fast after that, too fast for me to lay a hand on any single part of it. A customer I've never seen buys the one book I'd never expect, Josie's poetry, pays in cash, and is gone before the bell finishes ringing. I never heard him come in.