32. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
One Year Later
The coffee cup goes out with a star on it.
But this time, I’m not the one who drew it.
Zachary stands at the counter in our kitchen, foam pen in hand, his tongue poking out slightly the way it does when he’s concentrating on something important. The star takes shape slowly, deliberately, with the careful precision of a man who’s practiced this particular skill in secret for months.
He’s got the concentration face on - the one that used to run board meetings, tongue pressed to the corner of his mouth, deployed now against a canvas of steamed milk.
There are three abandoned attempts in the sink.
The man liquidated a portfolio without blinking and has been defeated four times this morning by dairy.
“You’re watching me.”
“I’m admiring your technique.”
“You’re judging my technique.” He adds a final flourish and steps back. “There. Perfect.”
“The left point is longer than the right.”
“That’s artistic license.”
“That’s geometry failure.”
“Same thing.” He picks up the cup and turns it so I can see the full design. Inside the star, he’s drawn a small seven. “Seven years. Seven stars. It’s almost like I planned it.”
The star is crooked, earnest, over-worked at the corners - a learner’s star, kin to the wobbly ones carved into the shop shelves. And inside it, small enough that you’d have to know to look, the number seven.
“Year seven,” he says, watching me find it. “I checked the archive for formatting standards. Your stars always had the year hidden in them. Mine will too.”
“You checked the archive.”
“I have the complete collection. I’m very serious about this hobby now.”
The collection lives in the shop now - the drawer’s whole archive, moved out of hiding the way everything eventually got moved out of hiding.
There’s a flat glass case near the register, museum-style, and inside it, rotated monthly by curatorial whim: three of my notes, one of his bookmarks, and the wallet note, soft as cloth at the folds, with a little hand-lettered card Rosie made that reads EXHIBIT A.
Customers ask. We tell them the short version. The long version is shelved all around them.
“You didn’t plan it.”
“I planned some of it.” He sets down the foam pen and admires his work. “The star, specifically. I’ve been practicing.”
“I noticed. The last six attempts are still in the trash.”
His face falls. “You weren’t supposed to see those.”
“I see everything. I’m a bookshop owner. Observation is half my job.”
“What’s the other half?”
“Pretending I don’t see everything so people feel comfortable making bad decisions in my mystery section.”
He laughs, and the sound fills the kitchen the way it’s been filling our apartment for the past year. Easily. Naturally. Like it belongs here.
“Happy anniversary,” he says, handing me the cup.
“Happy anniversary.” I take a sip. The coffee is perfect; the star tastes like foam. “Your gift is on the nightstand, by the way.”
He watches me drink it the way I used to watch him - the whole performance, tracking, hoping - and when I lower the cup and he sees my face, his shoulders come down from around his ears, and it occurs to me that this is what six years of my mornings looked like from the other side of the counter, and I put the cup down and kiss him for a long time on general principle.
“You already gave me a gift.”
“That was your morning gift. This is your real gift.”
“How many gifts are there?”
“Several.” I grin at him over the rim of the cup. “I’m making up for lost time.”
“I thought I was the one making up for lost time.”
“We can both make up for lost time. It’s not a competition.”
“Everything’s a competition.” He crosses the kitchen and wraps his arms around me, coffee cup and all. “I just happen to be winning.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“I’m charming.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He kisses me, soft and slow, morning breath and coffee and the familiar shape of a man I’ve relearned how to love. When he pulls back, his eyes are bright.
“Your gift,” he says, “is on the hall table.”
“The hall table?”
“It’s too big for a nightstand.”
The gift on the hall table is a book.
It’s wrapped in brown paper and string - shop wrapping, our wrapping, the kind we do at the register for tourists who want the full lighthouse-town experience - and he has botched one corner so thoroughly that the paper is mostly tape.
A man who once closed nine-figure deals, defeated by a corner.
I love the corner. I leave the corner attached when I open it, carefully, for the archive.
A first edition, beautifully preserved, with a handmade bookmark tucked inside. The binding is old but intact, the pages yellowed with age, the title embossed in faded gold.
A Moveable Feast.
“Open it,” Zachary says.
I do.
The book falls open to the title page, where an inscription waits in faded ink. Old handwriting, masculine, with the casual confidence of someone who never expected anyone else to read it.
To whoever finds this book: I hope you love someone the way I loved Paris. Completely, irrationally, without reservation. It’s the only way to live. -EH
I read the inscription.
Then I read it again.
“Is this-”
“Hemingway’s personal copy.” Zachary’s voice is quiet. “It took me eight months to track it down. There was an auction in London, and a collector in Switzerland, and a very complicated chain of provenance that I’m still not entirely sure was legal. The bookmark is from me, though.”
I open the bookmark.
The book you gave me made me want to be better. You made me actually be better. -Z
“You wrote me a bookmark,” I say. “In Hemingway’s personal copy. Which you hunted for a year. As a delivery device for a bookmark.”
“The book was the wrapping paper.” He shrugs, entirely unrepentant. “You taught me that. The most valuable thing in any book you ever handed me was the thing you’d hidden in it.”
I’m crying before I finish reading.
“This is too much.”
“It’s exactly enough.” He takes my face in his hands, thumbs wiping away tears. “The first one, you gave me when I didn’t deserve it. This one, I give you when I finally do.”
***
The shop is busy when we arrive.
A year of operation has turned the place into a neighborhood fixture, the kind of bookstore where regulars have favorite chairs and the staff knows everyone’s reading preferences. Rosie is behind the register, arguing with Walt about something that appears to involve a ladder and a high shelf.
There’s a rhythm to it now that I know by body clock.
The eight o’clock regulars who read standing up and buy on Fridays.
The ferry crowd at eleven, salt-aired and browsing on island time.
School lets out at three and the star shelves fill with small critics, and Walt arrives at four to disagree with all of them, and somewhere in there the light does the five o’clock thing my mother promised it would, gilding the whole front room, and every single day I stop whatever I’m doing for it.
Shop rule. The only one Rosie and I have never once broken.
“I’m telling you, the biography section doesn’t need to be alphabetized by middle name.”
“I’m telling you, it adds character.”
“It adds confusion. No one is looking for Harry S Truman under S.”
“They might be. You don’t know their research methods.”
At the fiction table, a summer woman down for the holiday weekend is holding Persuasion while Walt closes the sale with the confidence of a man who has read the flap copy and possibly the middle.
“The twist,” he tells her, “is she gets a second chance and takes it. That’s rare. In books and generally.”
“Isn’t that a spoiler?”
“It’s a warranty,” Walt says, and rings her up on the machine that is not from 1987, and I have to go stand in the stockroom for a minute for reasons that are nobody’s business.
“I know their research methods involve the alphabet. The regular alphabet. The one that starts with A.”
“It’s not 1987, Walt,” Rosie adds from the register, without looking up.
“Everyone keeps saying that to me like I don’t own a calendar.”
Edward, installed in the armchair by the history section with the Sunday paper - his chair now, by right of a full year of Sundays - turns a page and says, mildly, “Truman goes under T, Walt,” and returns to the news, and Walt reshelves the biography with the wounded dignity of a man betrayed by his own faction.
The front door chimes, and I turn to find a familiar face.
Red hair. Freckles. The same earnest expression, though she’s taller now, the picture book in her arms replaced by something with chapters.
“Juliette!”
“Hey there.” I crouch down to her level, bringing my eyes to hers. “Look at you. You’re reading chapter books now.”
“My mom says I’m advanced.” She holds up the book, a middle-grade fantasy with dragons on the cover. “Can you recommend one like this but with more girl dragons?”
“I can absolutely recommend one like that. Follow me.”
I lead her to the children’s section, to the star-carved shelves that still make my chest tight every time I look at them. Her fingers find the nearest carved star automatically, tracing its outline like an old friend.
“Are there still new stars?” she asks.
“New stars?”
“My mom said the man who made these was going to add more. For every year you stay together.”
I look at the shelves. At the original stars, carved in those desperate months before I knew how the story would end.
And there, at the bottom of the newest shelf - one we added last spring when the children’s section outgrew its original space - a fresh star.
Small. Careful. With a tiny 1 carved inside.
He’s been adding to them.
“Yeah,” I say, my voice thick. “There are still new stars.”
“That’s good.” She nods solemnly. “My mom says the stars are important.”
“Your mom is very wise.”
“She says she’s very tired, but I think that’s the same thing.”
I laugh. “You said that last year.”
“It’s still true.”