Chapter Four
Margo
London
Margo paused in front of the Notting Hill bookshop, juggling her phone in one hand, coffee in another. Mr. Thornton had changed the books displayed there since she was in the shop yesterday.
Her phone pinged with an alert, and she scrolled through the email that had come in, reading the message from a longtime client whose husband had absolutely adored the painting they had found for him.
The couple had honeymooned at a villa in Italy three decades prior and had fallen in love with a framed painting in the master bedroom.
At the time, the artwork hadn’t been for sale, but decades later, the villa’s owners long gone and the heirs more concerned with unloading the property and raking in the profits, it came up for auction in Rome.
Sometimes, this game she played—securing and sourcing the rare and obscure—was a cutthroat one ruled by avarice and ego.
Other times, though—her favorite times, if she was being honest—she had the opportunity to reunite families with possessions that had been lost through generations, to find items whose emotional value transcended their monetary one, to bring joy and appreciation to people’s lives.
In undergrad, she’d majored in business because she’d been cognizant of the need to get a job that would pay enough to address her student loans as well as the fact that, unlike many of her peers, she didn’t have a safety net to fall back on.
When she graduated, she didn’t have an option of moving home to save money or someone she could go to if things fell apart.
But despite the practical considerations, she minored in art history because those classes were some of her favorites, a welcome respite from accounting courses and the like that sometimes made her want to pull her hair out.
She’d graduated with debt and the not-so-welcome realization that the job market was more competitive than she’d ever realized, and no one was particularly impressed by her undergraduate degree in a market where so many of her peers had more advanced degrees, so on she’d gone to grad school.
A master’s degree in Art Business was the perfect way to merge the practical and the emotional, the program’s location in London and the connections it provided an added bonus.
She’d already started a side hustle of antiquing in undergrad to help pay for her living expenses, her business’s social media presence growing at a time when people were drawn to images of beautiful objects that they could save as inspiration for items they wanted to have in their own lives.
Grad school had enabled her to level up her business, giving her the confidence, connections, and knowledge to turn Reynolds Acquisitions into something she was immensely proud of.
Striking out into business for herself turned out to be the best decision she’d ever made. Terrifying, yes, but rewarding in the sense that it put her in the driver’s seat. If she was going to succeed or fail, it was going to happen on her terms.
Her life was spreadsheets, not canvases, and she often wondered what all those columns and numbers would amount to.
Eventually, they would cease to matter, but the items she tracked and located—the works that artists poured themselves into, the cherished items passed from one generation to the next—that was the impact she wanted to have.
She played a small part in people’s lives, their histories, and that was enough.
Margo tucked the phone back into her bag, some of the day’s frustrations fading away.
With her free hand, she pushed open the door.
The little bell jingled above her, announcing her presence, but she called out to him as well.
“It’s Margo.” She glanced down at her watch. “Sorry, I’m a bit early. Things finished up at the office and I thought I would come over here.”
None of the auction houses she had reached out to had heard anything about A Time for Forgetting coming up for sale. None of them had even heard of the book or Eva Fuentes. Hopefully, Mr. Thornton had something for her to go on, because so far she’d wound up with a lot of dead ends.
Margo turned toward the table in the front. He curated his titles the same way gardeners lovingly toiled over their flowers, and she could easily envision him rotating the selection with enthusiasm as he engaged in a bit of matchmaking between the titles and his customers.
The book she had picked up at the bookshop yesterday had indeed been a delight—a mystery set in Barcelona that had left her guessing until the very end.
She’d read until nearly two in the morning.
She’d sat down in bed intent on reading only a few chapters before she fell asleep, but once she started, she’d been unable to stop.
The detective had been a cantankerous sort whose holiday was abruptly cut short by murder, and she’d sped through the pages feeling very much like she needed a holiday to Spain (without the dead body, of course) and determined to read more, considering the pleasure it brought her when she did.
It was the same when she did Pilates—getting to her studio for class was always a struggle, a myriad of excuses coming to mind when her day went off the rails as it inevitably always did.
But on the days that she did go, she was always immensely grateful for the effort, for the fifty minutes when she could lie back on the reformer and close her eyes, feeling the breath flow through her body, the tension seeping out of her.
Reading was like that, like falling into another world, mind and body consumed. She’d needed it more than she realized.
A thud sounded somewhere in the back of the shop.
“Mr. Thornton?” Margo called out, walking toward the noise.
Margo had only been in his inner sanctum a time or two, but she had seen the towers of books and boxes that occupied the workspace.
She’d teased Mr. Thornton that he should find an assistant to help him with the shop’s operations, but he’d grumbled that no one knew his bookstore as well as he did, and considering her own reluctance to hire someone to help with her business, she couldn’t blame him.
Bea was a rock star, but not everyone was lucky enough to find someone like her.
Margo stopped in her tracks.
Books spilled out onto the floor from one of the bookshelves, their leather spines resting on the ground. Some of the books yawned open, yellowed pages facing out.
Margo bent down, setting her coffee on the ground, and scooped up the books, putting them back on the shelf. The order was wrong, undoubtedly, and Mr. Thornton would likely want to fix it as soon as he could, but—
“Mr. Thornton?” she called out again. “Is everything alright?”
Had something happened? The back room might normally be a mess, but the bookshop was always immaculate. She could no sooner imagine him allowing books to rest on the ground than she could envision him running stark naked through the shop.
Margo pulled her phone out of her purse, and continued walking toward the back, scanning her surroundings. There were more books on the ground, but this time she didn’t stop to pick them up. Her heart pounded, her limbs feeling heavy as dread flooded her body.
She froze.
For a moment, she was having an out-of-body experience, like she was in a movie or in the pages of the novel she’d been reading last night, mentally yelling at the character not to take a step forward, not to investigate when all the signs indicated that something was seriously wrong.
But maybe there was a reason that they always took another step forward in the movies, why they didn’t do the sensible thing and go for help when things seemed off.
It was human nature to be curious, to question, to wonder, and also perhaps a misplaced sense of invincibility that suggested the bad things one experienced in fiction couldn’t—shouldn’t—happen in real life.
She walked toward the back room.
The smell hit her first.
It was the scent of coffee mixed with something else, something she couldn’t quite identify, but it made her stomach roil just the same.
“Mr. Thornton—”
The formality seemed incongruous with the reality of the situation, but he’d always been Mr. Thornton to her, a man she’d treated deferentially, formally, because there was a quality about him, a gravitas of sorts.
His name died in her throat.
A glass coffeepot lay on the floor, the carafe shattered, liquid spilling out all over the parquet.
It spread toward a growing liquid of something dark, red—
Margo screamed.
Mr. Thornton lay on his stomach a few feet beyond the coffee spill, a pool of blood surrounding him.
She raced toward him, dropping to the ground, her legs shaking, heart pounding.
His head was turned to the side, his eyes closed, and she reached out, placing her fingers to search for his pulse.
“Please, please…”
It was there. Faint, but it was there.
Her hand fell away, relief flooding her.
Using one hand to brace Mr. Thornton and the other to move him onto his back, to search his wounds, Margo gently rolled him over.
The scream died in her throat.
His white collared dress shirt was covered in red, a nasty gaping wound near the vicinity of his heart.
He’d been stabbed.
Her mind raced, all the order and logic that normally defined her world absent now. It was hard to think through the panic consuming her.
Margo’s fingers trembled as she dialed the number for emergency services. With that much blood—
She rattled off the address to the emergency operator, struggling to keep her voice calm as she relayed the nature of her emergency and answered the operator’s questions.
“I’m getting help, I promise,” Margo urged Mr. Thornton.
Could he hear her?
“They’re five minutes out,” the operator said in her ear.
Margo took a deep breath, trying to still her racing nerves. Adrenaline coursed through her body, taking over when the truth was that she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.