Chapter One #3
Ahead of Margo, people were stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, clearly dazzled by the falling wetness.
“And the meeting?” Bea asked in her ear. “Do we have a new client?”
“It was fine. He’s an intermediary. His client wants us to acquire a book for him.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“You’d think. Apparently, it’s the only copy in existence.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. Remind me later that what I love most about this job is the fact that it’s never boring.”
“There is that,” Bea agreed.
“I need you to check on the wire. Tell me if it has gone through yet.”
“Let me see,” Bea replied.
Through the mobile connection, Margo could hear the background noise of their little office in Chelsea.
Margo wove her way through the crowd, the snow falling even more steadily than before. It was going to be hard to get a taxi tonight.
Someone bumped her from behind, and Margo glanced back.
Two teenage girls were texting on their phones, glossy carrier bags hanging off their wrists.
They seemed as unmoved by the snow as Margo was.
Margo looked past them, her gaze catching with that of a lone man in a black jacket walking a few steps behind the teenage girls.
He wasn’t looking at the snow falling from above, but rather straight ahead at the girls, who seemed completely oblivious to his presence.
He was built like a linebacker, broad of shoulder and much taller than her own five feet, six inches. His blond hair was close-cropped, almost military in style.
Margo slowed slightly, giving the girls space to pass her, waiting to see if the man took the opportunity to continue behind them.
He didn’t.
Good. Maybe she was overreacting, but as a single woman in the city, she’d learned to be cautious, and she’d been the recipient of other women looking out for her, so it was right to do the same for them. There had been a rash of mobile phone thefts lately—
“Margo—”
Bea’s voice in her ear brought her back.
“Yes?”
“The wire’s good. The money hit the account.”
“Time to get to work, then.”
“Are you coming back to the office tonight?”
“No, I’m going to head to Notting Hill,” Margo replied.
“To see Mr. Thornton?”
“I figure he’s the best person to help me track down the book. He’ll probably be excited for the challenge.”
Margo turned down a side street, the crowd thinning considerably. The Tube station was a few blocks away still, but at least it was less congested off the familiar tourist street.
She glanced back over her shoulder once more, lengthening her strides a little bit.
The teenage girls were gone, replaced by a family of four, the mom arguing with her kids over the need to zip up their coats with the falling snow. The man in the black jacket was fifty or so yards behind the family.
His head was ducked so she couldn’t see his face, but his body moved down the sidewalk as though he was intent on his destination.
So why had he slowed down?
Margo hesitated, a flicker of unease filling her. She reduced her pace slightly, waiting for him to pass her.
He didn’t.
She glanced over her shoulder quickly.
The family was still there, at her heels now, but the man was nowhere to be seen.
Relief filled her, her heartbeat returning to normal.
She was mugged a few months after she’d first moved to London, the whole thing so quick, she hadn’t even realized it happened until she had gone to buy a coffee and noticed her wallet was missing, the memory of someone brushing up against her, of her purse strap slipping off her shoulder for an instant coming back to her.
While the experience had been little more than a headache over canceled cards and a need for new identification, it had made her more wary when she was on the streets.
Margo turned the corner, the familiar sign for the Tube station coming into view.
The Tube would be crowded, particularly now that it was rush hour. She’d take the Victoria line train to Oxford Circus and transfer there to head to Notting Hill.
—
The bookstore was nestled in a nook in Notting Hill, a green awning and matching door inviting the public to come in from the cobblestones and find a life-changing adventure nestled within the pages of a book.
Mr. Thornton had run the bookshop for decades and was a staple in the London literary community.
He was the person when it came to sourcing books.
The title on his business card may have been “bookstore owner,” but in practice he was a book historian.
He knew the books’ secrets, and he’d yet to disappoint her when Margo needed to track down a particularly difficult one.
He was also a mentor of sorts to her, one of the colleagues in her field that she most admired for his dedication, professionalism, and passion. He had always been kind and helpful to her, even when she was starting out and very few people took her seriously, considering her age and inexperience.
In the beginning, Margo’s business had started on social media, specializing in finding unique antiques that she sold through her online presence.
She’d barely cleared enough to make her student loan payments, but it earned her a following and the ever-important client connections that had become the bedrock of her company.
One of her initial clients had come to her on referral and hired her to find a rare set of Dickens books.
At the time, Margo had been desperate to have some income and to build her business.
She’d reached out to one of her grad school professors, who immediately referred her to Thornton’s Bookshop.
She’d never forget how Mr. Thornton had helped her or how he’d treated her.
It wasn’t the first time impostor syndrome had snuck in, and it wouldn’t be the last, but in one of the moments of her career when success seemed out of reach and she feared she should give up, he’d encouraged her.
Margo pushed open the door, the gold bell at the top heralding her arrival, the familiar scent of old books and lemon furniture polish greeting her.
“One moment,” a voice called out from the shop, and even though she couldn’t see him from her vantage point at the entrance, Margo envisioned Mr. Thornton in the back, hunched over the mahogany table, a book in front of him.
In a city that was constantly “on the move,” she loved these quiet spaces, these little retreats where you could dip in and instantly be transported, where the minutiae of daily life simply disappeared.
Margo busied herself with perusing the shelves, trying to remember the last time she’d had the opportunity to read a good book.
It was always one of her resolutions when the year began—that she would read more, use her morning commute from her flat in Kensington to her office in Chelsea to listen to an audiobook, that she would join a book club, that she would finally tackle that never-ending list of books that she had mentally jotted down—recommendations from Mr. Thornton and others.
When she was younger, she had loved to read, had happily spent hours in bookstores and libraries.
She had loved mysteries, had envisioned herself slipping between the pages of the books and taking the main character’s place.
The adventures she read about became her adventures, and even though she had spent the entirety of her childhood in Virginia, in her wildest fantasies she had traveled through time and space, across oceans and centuries.
When had reading changed for her? When had she lost the ability to imagine things?
Grad school, perhaps? Undergrad? Her studies had somewhat killed the pleasure of reading for fun for her.
She remembered reading for exams, drying out highlighters on the papery-thin pages of her textbooks, remembered the anxiety of worrying whether her grades would slip, and she’d lose her scholarship.
She remembered reading into the late hours of the evening, until exhaustion overtook her, the words blurring together as her head ached with the effort.
She couldn’t remember the last time a book had given her pleasure.
Margo reached out, stroking the spine of the book in front of her.
“Ah, that’s a good one. I think you’d like it.”
Margo glanced up, startled by the sight of Mr. Thornton standing before her, a bemused expression on his face.
From his vantage point, it was impossible to see the gold-lettered title, but she wasn’t even remotely surprised he knew which book she was looking at solely from her position in the stacks.
He was intimately familiar with each book in his shop.
“A gift,” he added, reaching over to the shelf, and plucking the novel into her waiting hands.
The familiar weight of it sent off a spark inside her, a muscle memory from when she was a little girl and her mother would take her to the library after school. Back then the fact that she could check out books for free and take them home with her to peruse at her leisure was magic.
Margo smiled. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure. You look like you need a good book.”
“How can you tell?”
In her line of work, you learned the importance of reading people, of understanding human behavior so that you could predict their wants and needs—and their vulnerabilities, too.
Mr. Thornton had a knack for reading people, but there was something deeply soothing in the way he did it.
Perhaps in being a procurer of books, he was also a procurer of dreams.
“You look distracted. Like you’re working out a problem you haven’t quite been able to solve. You work too much.”
“I could say the same about you,” she teased.
He laughed. “Very true. Are we about to embark on another literary adventure?”
“Possibly. I need some help,” Margo admitted.
“Let me guess, you have a client who has an impossible book request?”
“I don’t know how impossible it is, but I have a client who is looking for a book that is supposed to be coming up for auction soon and he wants me to procure it for him before it hits the market.
Says it’s a sentimental acquisition. But there’s not much to go on, and apparently there’s only one copy of this book in existence. ”
Mr. Thornton whistled, his smile growing. “That is a challenge.”
She grinned. “I had a feeling you would be up for it. Whenever I need a book, you’re always the person I think of.”
“I’m honored.”
He said it more as a formality than anything else. They both knew he had earned his reputation and the respect that came with it.
Margo pulled the folded sheet of paper out of her handbag and handed it to him.
He opened the paper, scanning the contents.
“Now that’s interesting,” he said, looking up to meet her gaze, a gleam in his eyes.
“What’s interesting? Have you heard of the book before?” Margo asked, excitement filling her.
Could it really be this simple? She’d come here hoping that if anyone could find the book, it would be Mr. Thornton, but considering how obscure the title was, she hadn’t dared to consider the possibility that he might be familiar with the book himself.
“A month ago, someone came to the shop asking about this very book.”
Her heart pounded. “Was it William Greer? With an American accent?”
“Not an American, no. It was a man, but I can’t remember his name.”
Was someone else trying to find A Time for Forgetting ? Had they already found it?
“A bit older than you, perhaps,” Mr. Thornton added. “Forties, maybe.”
“Did he say why he wanted the book?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Were you able to locate it?”
“No, and details were hard to come by. The author was Cuban. Deceased now. The book was published in English by a small publisher in Boston that’s no longer in business. I have the name in my records; I can find it for you. I gave him what I found, but then I never heard from him again.”
“May I see what you have on it? Any research you did before you stopped working for him?”
“Of course. If I can find it.” He winced. “My files are—”
She grinned. “A mess,” she finished for him.
He laughed. “You know me too well. I had a shipment come in from Antwerp, and I’ll confess, I’ve been thoroughly consumed.”
For as impeccable as the bookshop was, the back room where he handled the business operations was anything but. It was almost as though he exhausted the extent of his organizational efforts when he catalogued the books and there was nothing left over for anything as mundane as invoices.
“When do you think you’ll be able to get the information together for me?” Margo asked. “I know you’re busy.”
“Come by the shop tomorrow. I promise I’ll have everything. Why don’t you stop by around six, right after I close? We can catch up over a cup of tea.”
“That’s perfect. Thank you. And thank you for the book,” she added, gesturing to the title he had given her. “I’m excited to start reading it.”
Margo tucked the book in her purse and headed out of the shop, phone in hand. If someone else had already gone to Mr. Thornton about A Time for Forgetting , then time was of the essence.
The snow had thankfully stopped falling once she reached the Tube station, the crowds still thick from all the tourists and commuters.
When she moved to London, she was originally drawn to the fact that the city never slept, that there was always something going on no matter the time of day.
Some of that excitement had waned a bit, considering the practicalities of having to navigate daily life and responsibilities in such a place, but the city still energized her.
Margo weaved her way through the crowds, heading toward the platform just as the familiar roar of the Tube car coming down the tracks hit the station.
She boarded the train, inwardly groaning at the fact that it was beyond crowded this evening, no available seat in sight. She’d entertained a little fantasy about finding a nice place to sit and cracking open the book Mr. Thornton had given her, but it appeared she would be standing instead.
Margo maneuvered her way into a spot between two women dressed in suits, their bodies brushing against one another as they all tried to find a space to stand.
Just as the doors closed, she glanced up at the sea of unfortunate commuters who had just missed the train by seconds, one woman pounding on the doors as they shut in her face.
Margo’s breath hitched.
The man in the black jacket was there again, standing on the platform, the Tube doors the only barrier between them.
It hit her in waves, the memory coming back to her—it was the same man. The one she had seen on the street after she had gone to the meeting with Greer.
Margo watched as he seemingly scanned the cars, until—
Their gazes connected.
The train carried her away.