Chapter Thirty
CHAPTER
Thirty
AT HIS DESK, Lowell runs his fingers across the last sentence again. Just the two of us.
Once upon a time, Lowell Sharpe’s father walked into a bookshop, desperation in one fist and a child’s hand in the other.
The child would grow up to be the third of three sons, each bought and paid for with a book that would change their parents’ lives.
Or, put another way, the child is one of three firstborn sons, but as the last acquisition in a collector’s hand, he must settle for third-son status and be satisfied with it.
Third sons do not inherit bookshops.
Third sons sweep floors, polish light fittings, check stock long after everyone else has gone to bed. Third sons get loaned out to other owners as and when they’re required, and returned when they’re not.
“What did you need us for?” he asks.
His owner shrugs. “I didn’t. I just needed the exchange to be fair.”
It’s a very specific definition of fair, written in blood and a child’s tears.
Lowell becomes accustomed to this version of fair. He tries, over the years, to accept his fate, to varying degrees of success. It’s a fairness also imposed on his brothers, he knows.
Sometimes Lowell wonders what he stole from them, when he arrived.
Squeezing a third into a space that perhaps wasn’t meant for three eldest sons.
Edmund was already there, some years older; yet still young enough to resent Lowell’s childish questions, Lowell’s homesickness for a home that no longer belonged to him, Lowell’s numerous attempts to run away, even though there was nowhere to run to.
And then there was Arthur.
Bright, funny, ridiculous Arthur, with his floppy auburn hair and easy smile.
Who managed to brush away Edmund’s stormy moods, who had lightened every room he walked through, who had shown Lowell all the delights of the bookshop—what he could have, if he chose to build a life within it.
Who had made them brothers, in every way that mattered.
Arthur, who they had buried in a rosewood coffin a little over eight months ago.
Edmund and Lowell haven’t spoken much since then.
Just the two of us.
Lowell recalls the night he’d met Chiron, only a few months after Arthur’s funeral.
By then, Edmund had long delegated the running of the bookshop to him, abandoning the responsibility in every way but name.
Not that Lowell hadn’t tried to persuade him to hand over the bookshop.
If Arthur was still there—still alive—perhaps he might have.
But then, if he’d been there, there would have been no question over the bookshop’s ownership, and maybe Edmund and Lowell would still be brothers in the ways that mattered.
He’d stayed longer in the bookshop than he’d meant to, still been seething over the latest argument, when Chiron had tried to break in.
Old men, he’s discovered, are not so skilled in sleuthing, or making the kind of noiseless steps needed for such an enterprise.
Owners are habitually made of tough material, but Chiron had looked weary when Lowell had caught him coming out of the office, a book tucked under his arm as though he was merely going for a stroll.
Like he was ready to be caught, and be done with it all.
And perhaps he really was done. Because in the next few weeks, he was dead, and there was the letter in Lowell’s in-tray.
The possibility of an entirely new future in a few short sentences.
No more managing Edmund’s mercurial temper and demands.
No more wishing for a world that would never quite belong to him.
He would have a bookshop. Lowell’s bookshop.
But Chiron hadn’t warned him about Cassandra Fairfax.
Cassandra, who he’d first mistook as a scruffy, flighty thing—a person in over their head, who would cave quietly and quickly.
Then a clearer portrait had emerged—which was to say, not clear at all, with the blank canvas of her history that she’s so assiduously avoided painting.
Just the quick brushstrokes of a woman about to run.
Sharp wit, sharper eyes that seem to pick up everything.
A smile that suggests he really, really shouldn’t trust her.
Edmund opens the door to the office without knocking, making him jump.
His appearance, as usual, is accompanied by a face like a thundercloud, his mouth twisted in a grimace.
Aloysius has already taken to spending the day hidden amongst the more difficult-to-access bookshelves, and Lowell can’t really blame him.
“You need to stop talking to Cassandra Fairfax,” Edmund says.
Lowell returns to his ledger. “You need to regain your understanding of what a closed door means.”
“This is my office,” Edmund says.
“Yet I’m the one currently working on our intake,” Lowell counters. “When was the last time you sat behind this desk?”
Edmund’s scowl deepens, but Lowell is unrepentant.
It’s a truth that Edmund can’t refute. The last time he’d sat here as an owner had been in the first few weeks after Arthur’s death, facing the enormity of what had happened.
The bookshop is not typically attuned to their moods, but by the end of those weeks, it had thrown books from their shelves, sprouted leaks in a dozen different places, wailed mournfully with the wind.
Only when Edmund left did it settle back into its natural, peaceable state.
Lowell still can’t imagine what made Edmund return. Selfishness, perhaps. Or a desire to claw back the only thing that Lowell’s ever really loved.
“I’m not debating this. You’ll stop talking to that woman. Or—”
“Or what?” Lowell says coolly. “You’ll throw me out of the bookshop?”
His heart is pounding as he says it, even though it’s a bluff neither of them will ever call. Edmund can’t run this bookshop without him, just as he knows Lowell will never leave. So here they are, permanently at an impasse.
“You don’t know what she’s done,” Edmund says.
Lowell’s eyebrow rises ever so slightly. “And you do?”
He badly wants to ask questions, though by now he knows it’s just another way for Edmund to wind him up.
To hold the cards in his hands and refuse to lay them out on the table.
But for all his brother’s pig-headed behaviour, there are a few troubling points that Lowell’s been hard-pressed to forget.
Cassandra’s theft, for one. Her past, scoured clean.
And the way she’d read without a book—pulling power from the river itself.
“You don’t get to make decisions for me, Edmund,” he says quietly. “Not anymore.”
A tense, sharp silence cuts through the room. Edmund looks at him as though he could say everything in the world—and he probably already has, in one of their fights. But nothing he says can justify himself. Not after what he did.
God, how Lowell misses Arthur.
Edmund pinches the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Just stay away from her. Do what you’re supposed to do, like your job.” He pauses. “She’s bad news, Lowell. I won’t have her under this roof.”
This roof that Lowell supports, that wouldn’t have anything underneath it at all unless he was there. He bites back a retort as his brother leaves.
Edmund might be right. Cassandra might be trouble, where books are involved. Then Lowell thinks of her irrepressible courage, her smile, that glint in her eye that means she’s readying herself for a challenge.
Just the two of us.
He shouldn’t like the sound of that. But he does.