9. Norah
Chapter nine
Norah
Imeasure time in the days since Silas Coulter walked into my shop.
It’s been ten days, and I’ve been fine for all of them, including the three after the hardware store on Monday. What’s replaying in my head is the answer to my question.
I wanted to and that seemed like a reason to wait.
He said it with the calm certainty of a man announcing a weather forecast. I still don’t know what to do with that.
Fine. Completely fine. Moving on.
The trivia night flier says: TEAM: THE LAST CHAPTER—Trivia Night, Hannigan’s Bar, Sunday 8pm. Join us. Bring your brain. Leave your ego at the door.
I drew a small stack of books in the corner because I believe in visual communication and relish a fine-tip marker when I have time on my hands on slow afternoons.
The flier has been on the bulletin board behind the register for two weeks.
Approximately half the customers who’ve seen it have said some version of oh, trivia, fun and done nothing about it.
The other half ignored it entirely. Exactly zero of them have stepped up to form a team with me and my staff. I’m choosing not to take it personally.
It’s a good flier.
Jewell doesn’t think the flier is the point when I knock on her door at seven fifteen on Sunday night. But Jewell is wrong about that and several other things, and I tell her so while she locates her jacket, her keys, and the energy required to leave the house on a Sunday evening.
“I was writing,” she says, from somewhere in the back of her house.
“You’re always writing.”
“That’s because I’m a songwriter.” She appears in the doorway with a black leather bomber slung over one arm and the expression of someone who is already second-guessing their decision.
“Some of us have a craft,” she says.
“Some of us are also going to win fifty dollars and a paid bar tab up to a hundred,” I say.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that. I’ve been saving questions about literary history for two weeks. Nobody in that bar is going to know who wrote the first English language novel and I’m going to destroy them with it.”
“Someone is going to say the Bible and that’s going to start a war.”
I guffaw. “I can’t wait to see who does that. My bet’s on that red-headed dude from Abernathy’s Men’s Clothing. What’s his name? Chad?”
Jewell studies me with the focused attention she reserves for lyrics that aren’t working and friends who are being slightly transparent. “This isn’t about the trivia, is it?”
“It’s entirely about the trivia.”
“Uh huh,” she says, and pulls the door shut behind her.
We walk to Hannigan’s in thick heat. Along the way, tables spill onto sidewalks, and music pours from deep in a restaurant two doors down. People linger over drinks and late dinners as if Monday can wait another hour. Jewell bumps her shoulder into mine about a block in.
“So what’s actually going on?”
“I told you. Trivia.”
“You told me trivia,” she says. “You didn’t tell me why you’ve been walking around your living room for a week like you’re working something out. The walls are thin, doll. I can hear you.”
“I narrate internally. It’s a process.”
“That’s my line.”
“It’s a good line.”
She huffs out a laugh and lets it go—one of Jewell’s better qualities.
She knows when to push and when to walk beside you and let the thing work itself out on its own timeline.
The information I have been organizing for ten days is not ready to be shared.
Organized information is the only kind I share.
The bar is already loud when we reach it, with voices layered over each other and someone near the back telling a joke that earns a collective groan. It smells like beer, fried food, and warm chaos.
Jewell pauses beside me on the threshold. “We can still leave,” she says.
“We’re not leaving.”
“You’re very committed to this.”
“I’m committed to winning. There’s a difference.”
She nods with the expression of a woman who has accepted her fate. “All right. Let’s make a mistake.”
I scan the room for an open table. Then I see him at the bar.
I push the door all the way open and step inside.
The sound hits all at once, and I let it break around me, scanning the room.
Tables are pushed together for teams, answer sheets scattered between glasses and baskets of food.
The host is at the front setting up his microphone with the focused energy of a man who takes trivia very seriously. I respect that completely.
He’s leaning forward with one elbow braced against the wood, a bottle held loosely in his other hand, laughing at something the man beside him has said, low and real, the laugh that doesn’t match the rest of him.
His ubiquitous white T-shirt fits clean across his shoulders.
His thick, dark hair has a slightly-too-long look, falling forward when he tilts his head, and I immediately remember how close his mouth was to mine Thursday night.
Then Silas looks at me, and the humor disappears from his face.
Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone around me would notice—it’s more a change in my awareness, the same way the weather changes when the barometric pressure drops before a storm. I know it before I turn toward it.
The man beside him is younger, even broader through the shoulders, with an easy grin that suggests he finds the world fundamentally amusing.
Jewell takes two steps before she realizes I’ve stopped walking.
“Oh,” she says softly, following my line of sight. Then, after a beat: “Well. That explains last week.”
“It explains nothing. I don’t know why he’s here.”
“I know why he’s here,” she says.
“You’ve never met him.”
“I don’t need to,” she says, with the serene confidence of someone who has written enough songs about human behavior to consider herself an authority on it. “Look at where he’s standing.”
I look.
He’s positioned with his back to the wall and a clear sightline to the door. I noticed it the second I saw him. He’s been watching the entrance.
“Table,” I say. “We need a table.”
“You need a moment,” Jewell says.
“We need a table,” I repeat, and move toward the first high top open seats by the wall.
She follows, slipping onto the stool next to me with the expression of someone who is going to be very patient about this and wants me to know it.
I risk a glance back at the bar.
He’s looking at me.
Direct and steady and entirely without apology, and it catches in my chest with the same inconvenience of the last ten days.
“He’s definitely looking,” Jewell says.
“I know.”
“Are you going to do something about it?”
“I’m formulating a strategy,” I say.
“The strategy is to go over there.”
“That’s a very amateur strategy.”
“The best ones always are,” she says, and reaches for the answer form. Wing woman. She’s decided and she’s fine with it.
I look at the answer form. I look at the bar. I look even harder at the answer form.
The thing is, Hannigan’s is four blocks from The Last Chapter. Silas Coulter has been on my street twice, in my hardware store once, and now he is in my trivia bar on a Sunday night with a clear sightline of the door.
I’m a pretty aware person. I notice things. What I’m noticing is that none of this is accidental.
I push my chair back.
Jewell lights up instantly.
“We need more people for trivia,” I say.
“That’s the reason you’re going with?”
“It’s a legitimate reason. The more the merrier is a documented phenomenon.”
“Documented by who?”
“Everyone,” I say, “trivia players especially.” I stand up.
Walking over to him is a choice, and I know exactly why I’m making it. The crowd flows around me but I keep my eyes forward until I’m close enough that looking at him is unavoidable.
He turns before I reach him.
“This might be a strange question,” I say, looking between him and the man beside him, “but are either of you any good at trivia, or are you only here for the craft beer?”
The man beside him grins immediately, and I can see it now, the similarity in the jaw, the shoulders, the self-possession that seems to run in this interesting wolf pack. “Depends,” he says. “Are we being evaluated or recruited?”
“Both,” I say. “We have standards.”
“I’m Henry,” he says, thrusting his hand out and smiling like this is already going well and he knew it would. “I’m excellent at trivia.”
I shake his hand. It dwarfs mine, but he’s warm and his grip is firm, and I am immediately put at ease.
“He’s not,” Silas says.
“I am a wunderkind at trivia,” Henry says, entirely untroubled.
“I’m Norah,” I say as his arm pumps my hand.
I look at Silas then, properly. He’s composed, steady, reading me while I read him, the same quiet assessment we’ve been doing since the day we met.
“Funny place to end up on a Sunday night,” I say. “Hannigan’s. Right down from my shop.”
“Henry wanted to try it,” he says.
“Henry,” I repeat. I look at Henry, who has the expression of a man watching the scene he was fully briefed on play out exactly as predicted. “And Henry heard about Hannigan’s how?”
Henry opens his mouth.
“Henry,” Silas says, without looking at him.
Henry closes his mouth, reconsidering, and lifts his bottle instead.
I look back at Silas and wait, because I’m very good at waiting when the thing I’m waiting for is worth it. His expression is fractionally less composed than it was, and the control underneath it is taking more effort than usual. So yes, this is very worth it.
He holds my gaze for a moment.
“There’s a flier,” he says. “On the bulletin board behind your register.”
“There is,” I say.
“I saw it. You were recruiting for Team The Last Chapter.”
“And you thought you’d take a chance that I’d be here.”
“I thought it was possible,” he says, “that a person who posts a trivia night flier in her own shop might show up to the trivia night she posted a flier for.”
His lip twitches.
“That’s a very logical gamble,” I say.
“I’m a logical person.”
“You drove past my shop for three years without stopping,” I say, “and now you’re in my trivia bar on a Sunday night because of a flier you saw ten days ago.” I tilt my head. “That’s not serendipity. That’s a decision.”