26. Norah
Chapter twenty-six
Norah
Idon’t go home right away.
Because going home and making tea and reading the next forty pages of the biography on my bedside table is what I should do.
So, I drive.
I only have to go a few blocks before the streetlights blaze overhead.
After a few blocks, I slip into an empty parking space in front of a new fusion restaurant just as another car pulls away.
Even as sleepy Norwood shutters, downtown is just ramping up.
Unlike my eclectic daily crowd of students, twenty-somethings, stay-at-home moms, and retired folk, the nighttime crowd here has the same demographic feel to it.
Primarily white, monied, babysitter at home with the kids kind-of-feel.
It’s vanilla but as safe as it gets in a downtown area. I get out and lock the door, slipping a few quarters in the meter.
I walk.
This is fine. This is me exercising my autonomy with an evening walk in a perfectly safe neighborhood several blocks from my shop, where the restaurants are still lit and the boutiques have their window displays going and the alleys are decorative and contain artisanal garbage.
The evening is warm. A restaurant door is propped open, customers sitting around café tables under an awning outside.
The scent of garlic and warm, yeasty bread wafts out, setting my stomach to grumbling.
Somebody using effort and skill, making something for people who planned ahead.
I’m mildly inspired and make a resolution to go to the grocery store tomorrow to restock my shrinking pantry and refrigerator shelves.
A couple passes me, arguing about Thai versus Italian with the focused energy of people who have been together long enough that the argument is affectionate.
A man on his phone gestures elaborately outside a vintage clothing store.
A woman walking her dog on an extendable leash ties him to a parking meter outside a gift store and steps inside.
The dog immediately stretches himself across the sidewalk, searching for his owner.
I step around the dog.
I used to love this unreservedly. The movement, the noise, the anonymity of a city where nobody cares what you’re doing as long as you’re not blocking the sidewalk.
I came here because I wanted this. I built The Last Chapter here because this felt like a place where a single woman running a bookshop could exist without having to explain herself to anyone.
Three years ago, that felt like enough. It was enough. I was happy with enough.
But if I’m being honest with myself, I started changing my mind long before tonight.
I think about what those two boys said. What they believed when they said it. That they were protecting a way of life that depended on people like Silas staying in their assigned place. That my choice was a problem requiring correction.
And then I think about what it takes to be Silas in this city.
Not just tonight. Every day. Every route through neighborhoods where people dwell who have opinions about where wolf-owned trucks should be.
In every negotiation, the other side has already decided what he is before he opens his mouth.
Every time he walks into a room, people sit up and pay attention, whether or not it’s in a good way.
And he’s been doing this his entire life.
The operational efficiency of that. The sheer daily cost of it.
Those guys in the alley are beside the point. They are a symptom. The condition is older and larger than two disgruntled young men who had a bad night.
I turn down a side street I like, narrower, quieter.
There’s a yarn shop I visit every six months or so when I’m ready to begin a new project.
Its window display has knit tops in summer fibers, hemp, bamboo, cotton, all chic and monochromatic.
It’s a lovely display, and I make a mental note to come back.
I pass a new wine bar with good lighting and a menu with eight items, a statement in itself.
Next door to that is a tailor whose window display houses an antique Singer sewing machine.
The contrast to the glass and chrome décor of the wine bar is somehow comforting.
This is the street I walk when I need to think.
Here is the question I keep arriving at and walking away from: if Silas had never come through that door, if I’d never met him, never offered him tea, never offered the book he had no intention of reading but took only because I recommended it, would any of this be different?
No.
The guys in the alley exist because the city is what it is.
Silas lives in the midst of that whether I’m in the picture or not.
I could walk away from him tomorrow, and the city would still be what it is, and he would still have to navigate it, and the next woman who made a choice they disapproved of would find herself in her own dim alley on her own evening.
The problem isn’t me choosing Silas.
The problem is a city that has already voted.
I stop outside the wine bar. Through the window: warm light, easy movement, a room full of people having a Thursday evening and finding it sufficient.
A woman on a stool laughing at something.
Two men in suits splitting a bottle with the comfortable ease of people who have done this before.
A couple in the corner leaning toward each other with the attention of people who are only barely remembering that other people exist in the room.
I look at all of it.
I like this city. I built a real business here.
The Last Chapter is mine in a way that nothing has ever been mine before, the handwritten signs, the mismatched armchairs, Mr. Clancy’s weekly Mystery, Thriller, Suspense order, Abigail’s steady invisible architecture holding the whole thing up.
Three years of stubbornness and questionable financial decisions, and a genuine belief that a bookshop done right is worth it.
I like the neighborhood, the regular customers, the satisfaction of matching the right book to the right person and watching their face when they realize it.
I like Jewell writing song lyrics in the margins of the trivia answer sheets.
I like knowing the dog my customer brings into the shop with him after her Saturday afternoon runs.
I like that the dog knows me enough to snuffle me and lick my hand.
I like my life here.
And then I think: but this city has decided it gets to have opinions about who I spend my time with. And none of that is going to change. The city won’t wake up one morning and decide it’s done having opinions. The alley boys won’t have a revelation.
This is what it is here.
I am thirty years old, and I’ve never been particularly good at being told what to do. Standing outside this wine bar on a warm evening, I admit I am significantly less interested in getting better at it.
The city doesn’t get a vote.
That’s the thing I keep landing on and walking away from because it has implications I haven’t been ready to follow all the way through. I’m following it now, on this narrow side street with the good lighting and the familiar tailor’s window, and here is where it goes,
If the city doesn’t get a vote, and I’m not waiting for it to change its mind, and Silas is…whatever Silas is…then the question isn’t whether I’m staying.
The question is what staying is actually costing.
I’ve been answering that one day at a time for three weeks.
I think about what leaving would mean. Not in the abstract, I’m past the abstract.
The Last Chapter would keep running. Abigail has always handled the legal scaffolding without ever trying to run the shop.
She’s always trusted me to run it, and I can trust her to keep the reins in hand while I’m gone.
Jesse knows Mr. Clancy’s schedule and the requirements of the woman who comes in every other Friday and needs something she hasn’t read but which feels like something she has.
Mark knows the regulars by name and knows when to talk and when to leave people alone with the shelves, which is actually the harder skill.
The handwritten shelf signs are already written. The armchairs are already there.
The shop doesn’t need me to keep being the shop.
I built it that way on purpose, even though I didn’t know I was doing it. I built it to outlast any version of my life, which is either good planning or a very revealing thing to have done unconsciously.
Penny would be fine. She’d be furious, and then she’d be fine, in that order, because that’s how Penny works.
She’d call me three times in the first week and then she’d show up wherever I was and eat all my food and tell me what she thinks, and then she’d go back to her life and we’d talk twice a week like we always have.
Penny has never once needed me to stay somewhere for her sake.
She would not appreciate me suggesting otherwise.
Jewell would write a song about it. I would let her. It would probably be good.
I walk back to my car. As I drive, the boutiques thin out as I get closer to home, the restaurants giving way to quieter storefronts, the crowd thinning to the occasional bar-hoppers. I turn onto my street.
The rowhouse sits where it always sits. The door is the color I chose because I wanted a color that wasn’t beige.
The small planter by the steps that has survived three years of my care, which is either a miracle or evidence of the plant’s strong character.
The light is on in the window in the living room because I always leave it on, because coming home to a dark house is a version of lonely I decided a long time ago not to subject myself to.
I stop on the sidewalk and look at it.
It’s a good life.
Genuinely good, built on purpose, and I’m proud of it. I’m not leaving because two boys in an alley scared me. Not because a police chief had a polite meeting in a back room. Not because a man’s father gave an order.
I’m considering leaving because I want to.
Because there might be a version of this life somewhere else, same armchairs, same instincts, same Norah, that doesn’t require spending energy I’d rather spend elsewhere on a city that has decided it gets to have biases about me.
Because built things don’t have to stay in the place they were built.
Because I am the thing that made The Last Chapter what it is, not the address.
Because, at thirty, I’m done letting a city decide what I’m allowed to want.
I go inside.
I put the kettle on and lean against the counter while it heats, looking at the kitchen.
The mugs on their hooks. The plant on the windowsill that surprisingly thrives here.
The stack of books on the table that I’ve been meaning to get to and haven’t.
The small ordinary geography of a life that fits me, that I chose, that I keep choosing, that I will keep choosing even if I’m choosing it somewhere else.
The kettle boils.
I make the tea.
I sit down at the table, and I don’t call Penny, don’t call Jewell, don’t text Silas.
I sit with it myself, in the quiet, a habit I don’t practice often enough.
I let the clarity be what it is without immediately doing anything with it.
I don’t make a list. I don’t draft a plan.
I don’t open my laptop and look at maps of towns three hundred miles north of here.
I sit with the thing that has arrived and let it take up space.
I wrap my hands around the mug.
The house is quiet. The city is winding down. I’m here making this decision for myself, before anyone else gets a vote.
And then I realize it’s okay to tell Silas about my evening. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a conversation starter.