The Faceoff (Whitmore U #1)

1. Sloane

Sloane

The bell above the bookstore door jingles for the seventeenth time in the last hour.

Not that I’m counting.

Okay, I’m absolutely counting.

When you spend an entire summer working six days a week in a bookstore the size of a shoebox, you start keeping track of weird things. Customers. Bell jingles. How many romance novels get shelved in the wrong section because people apparently think Emily Henry belongs next to Stephen King.

The answer is a disturbing number.

I slide another hardcover onto the shelf and step back to admire my work.

Margaret’s Books sits on the corner of Main and Mill Street, squeezed between a bakery that smells like brown sugar and a dying dream of an antique store that has been going out of business for at least three years without ever actually closing.

The building itself is old enough to qualify for a senior citizen discount — uneven hardwood floors worn soft in the middle, towering shelves that tilt at angles no structural engineer would endorse, a creaky staircase to the second floor that sounds like it’s actively plotting your murder every time you reach the fifth step.

It’s my favorite place in the world.

The air smells like paper and coffee.

The windows overlook the town green.

And Margaret Sorensen has spent the last three years treating me like the granddaughter she never got around to having.

Outside, Haven is doing what Haven does at the end of August — putting on a show.

The green spills down Main Street and up into the hills beyond it, the maples and elms still thick and full, the late light catching gold in the leaves that have started, just barely, to turn at the edges.

There’s something in the angle of that light, something low and slow, that says not for much longer.

September is three days away. The tourists will start thinning out. The town will exhale.

I have been waiting for that exhale since June.

Whitmore sits at the edge of Haven, separated from the town proper by a wide green quad and the kind of Gothic stone architecture that belongs on a brochure, which is exactly where it appears, four times a year, in high-glossy full color.

The campus in summer is a different animal than the campus in September — quieter, slower, populated only by athletes doing preseason training and the theater department running an intensive that I would have taken if it didn’t conflict with my bookstore hours.

By next week it’ll be different. The quads will fill back up, the coffee shops will have lines out the door again, and the dining hall on the east side of campus will smell like institutional pasta and ambition.

I find I’m looking forward to it in a way I haven’t let myself admit all summer.

“Sloane.”

I glance toward the counter.

Margaret is peering over the top of her reading glasses, studying something on her laptop with the focused concern she usually reserves for water-damaged first editions.

“Mm?”

“Do you know what TikTok is?”

A smile tugs at my mouth. “Unfortunately.”

She points at the screen. “Someone just posted a video of a man making soup inside a hollowed-out pumpkin.”

I blink. “What kind of soup?”

“Chicken noodle.”

I consider this for a moment. “Honestly? I’ve seen worse.”

Margaret lets out a long, aggrieved sigh. “The internet was a mistake.”

“Probably.”

She mutters something about the decline of civilization before returning her attention to the laptop. I bite back a laugh. Eighty-two years old and somehow still the funniest person I know — though she would absolutely deny that being funny was intentional, which is what makes it work.

The bell jingles again.

A tourist couple wanders inside clutching iced coffees and wearing matching sailing jackets the particular shade of navy that announces we are on vacation and we have made certain choices.

I spend the next twenty minutes helping them find local history books while Margaret rings up customers. Normal. Comfortable. Safe.

The kind of afternoon I’ve grown weirdly protective of over the past three months.

Which is, if I’m being honest with myself, a little pathetic. Being attached to a routine. Getting sentimental over a cash register and the smell of a room.

But I’ve had enough experience with people leaving to know that buildings stick around longer.

The thought sneaks up on me the way it always does, quiet and precise.

My mother.

My father.

My brother — though Danny’s is a different kind of leaving, the kind that comes with a phone call every Wednesday and a return date penciled into a calendar somewhere, which I know isn’t the same as staying but is close enough that I’ve made peace with it.

I force the thread away before it can pull.

Not today.

Today is a good day.

Today my roommates are coming home.

The Sailmaker has been unbearably quiet all summer, the way a house with four people in it becomes wrong-shaped when three of them are gone.

Sure, June stayed for part of it, appearing at odd hours with a coffee cup and a paperback and the gentle company that requires nothing from you.

And Wren came back for a week between hockey camps, leaving her equipment bag in the hallway and her practice schedules on the refrigerator.

But Margo spent most of the summer interning in Boston, sending daily voice memos that were essentially just her narrating whatever was happening around her.

I listened to all of them. Every single one.

I am not going to examine what that says about me.

A vibration buzzes in my back pocket.

Group chat.

MARGO

WE’RE TEN MINUTES AWAY.

WREN

Drive faster.

MARGO

I’M NOT DRIVING.

JUNE

Please don’t encourage reckless behavior.

MARGO

BOOOOO.

MARGO

SLOANE. DID YOU BUY SNACKS?

Yes.

MARGO

Define snacks.

Food.

MARGO

That tells me nothing.

You sound like a hostage negotiator.

WREN

Answer the question.

Traitors. Both of them.

I shove the phone away and go back to shelving.

The front door opens again. A blast of late-August air drifts inside — warm and green, cut grass and something dusty underneath it, the smell of the last week before the weather turns. Then a guy walks through carrying a hockey stick, because apparently there is no escaping the species.

Automatically, my mood drops three points.

Maybe four.

He heads for the sports section. I go back to the shelf. A minute later Margaret materializes beside me with the soundlessness she has somehow maintained into her eighties, which I have always found faintly alarming.

“You’re frowning.”

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

“I don’t like hockey players.”

Her eyes twinkle in a way that means she is about to be reasonable at me, which is her most effective weapon. “That’s a broad generalization.”

“It’s an accurate one.”

“You’re twenty years old, sweetheart.”

“Almost twenty-one.”

“You haven’t met enough hockey players to determine that.”

“One athlete was plenty.”

She doesn’t argue. She knows about Evan — not everything, just enough. Enough to know why the sight of any athlete in her store makes me recalibrate my entire afternoon. Enough to know why I spent most of June and July taking the long way home from work so I didn’t pass his apartment building.

She studies me for a moment with the calm, patient attention she gives to things she has decided to be worried about. Then she smiles, just slightly, and says, “You know, my grandson plays hockey.”

There it is. Every time.

“Margaret.”

“What?”

“You bring him up every time.”

“Because Beau is wonderful.”

“I’m sure Beau is delightful.”

“He is.”

I snort. The way she talks about him, you’d think he personally invented world peace and then donated it to the public domain.

Beau Sorensen — captain of the Whitmore Ravens, campus golden boy, professional reorganizer of other people’s attention.

I’ve never met him. Not once in three years, which feels statistically impossible given that his grandmother is essentially my second family, but somehow our paths have never crossed.

Not that I’m complaining. Everything I’ve heard about him sounds exhausting.

“He’s coming back to campus next week,” Margaret says, with the air of someone dropping a gift on a table.

“Congratulations?”

She laughs. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re biased.”

“I’m his grandmother. Bias is my job.”

Fair point.

I grin despite myself.

The afternoon passes in the easy, ambling way of good summer afternoons.

Customers come and go. The afternoon light shifts from gold to amber.

I shelve three boxes of new arrivals, help a woman find a book she describes only as “blue, with a flower, from the nineties,” and successfully talk Margaret out of responding to a one-star review with her personal philosophy on the moral failings of people who give one-star reviews.

By the time I lock the front door at six, the thing beneath my ribs has upgraded from trapped fireworks to something more pressing.

My girls are home.

Finally.

The drive from the bookstore to Sailmaker Lane takes less than ten minutes, which is one of Haven’s better qualities.

Nothing in this town is far from anything else — it’s one of those New England towns that somehow remained its actual size while everything around it expanded, the kind of place where you can walk from the green to the edge of campus in twenty minutes and pass three churches, a library, and a diner that has been run by the same family for forty years.

In September it smells like woodsmoke and cut grass and the sharpness of leaves starting to turn, which is the smell I’ve come to associate with arriving somewhere that matters.