CHAPTER ONE
The bell over the door was the first thing Marin Ashworth fixed, before the paint, before the plumbing, before she'd even found where Aunt Jo kept the spare keys.
It was a small brass thing, dented on one side from forty years of enthusiastic customers, and it made a sound like a question rather than an announcement — a bright, curious note that seemed to ask who's there?
instead of declaring that someone had arrived.
She'd forgotten how much she loved that sound until she heard it again on a Tuesday morning in September, propping the door open with a chair while she carried in a crate of paperbacks, and something in her chest loosened for the first time in eleven months.
"You're doing the thing again," said Priya Patel, coming up the sidewalk with two coffees and a box of pastries balanced against her hip like she'd been carrying breakfast into other people's chaos her whole life, which, at twenty-eight, she more or less had.
"The thing where you stand in doorways looking like you're not sure you're allowed inside. "
"I own the building, Priya."
"I know. It's very weird to watch." Priya nudged past her into the shop, set the coffees on the counter, and turned in a slow circle, taking in the shelves that still smelled faintly of sawdust from the new ones Marin had built along the east wall, the mismatched armchairs by the window, the espresso machine gleaming under its plastic wrap like a promise.
"Okay. It's really coming together. Josephine would be so smug right now. "
"She'd tell me I'm doing the shelving wrong."
"She would absolutely tell you that." Priya popped the lid off her coffee. "And then she'd be right, because you alphabetized fiction by title instead of author, and every single person who's ever worked retail is currently having an aneurysm on your behalf."
Marin laughed — an actual laugh, surprising herself with it — and went back out for the last crate.
The Inkwell & Anchor had belonged to her aunt for thirty-one years, a narrow clapboard building on Wharf Street with a bookshop in front and, through an archway hung with a curtain of glass floats that Aunt Jo had strung there sometime in the nineties, a café in back that looked out over the harbor.
Marin had spent four childhood summers here, sent up from Boston while her parents worked out whatever it was they'd eventually failed to work out, and she remembered those summers the way you remember a good dream: in pieces, warm and a little unreal.
The smell of the secondhand paperbacks. Her aunt's laugh, which started low and then climbed, like a kettle coming to boil.
The cat that had lived in the front window even then, a different cat, but somehow, in memory, the same cat.
She had not planned to come back. She'd had a life in Boston — an apartment with good light, a job editing manuscripts for a mid-sized publisher, a fiancé named Colin who did something with hedge funds that she'd stopped being able to explain to people at parties around year two.
And then, in the space of about four months last winter, the job had been "restructured" out from under her, and Colin had explained, with the calm of a man reading from cue cards, that he'd realized he wasn't ready, and then Aunt Jo — sharp, funny, unstoppable Aunt Jo, who Marin had genuinely believed might simply outlive everyone out of spite — had a stroke in the stockroom of her own shop and did not wake up again.
The lawyer's letter had arrived six weeks later. I leave the Inkwell & Anchor, in its entirety, to my niece Marin, who I hope will either love it as much as I did or have the good sense to sell it to someone who will.
Marin had read that line probably forty times before she'd let herself think about what she actually wanted.
And what she wanted, it turned out — sitting in her gray Boston apartment with a box of her aunt's letters open on her lap, most of them written in Jo's looping, impatient hand and signed your favorite aunt, obviously — was to go somewhere the bell over the door still asked a question instead of an apartment buzzer flatly informing her someone had arrived.
So here she was. Thirty-three years old, freshly unemployed and unengaged, standing in a bookshop in a town she hadn't really lived in since she was eleven, about to reopen it to the public in four hours whether she was ready or not.
"Where do you want the cat?" Priya called from the front window.
The cat in question — a marmalade tom named Dewey, inherited along with the building, the inventory, and a startling number of unpaid magazine subscriptions — was currently attempting to disembowel a box of bookmarks.
"Anywhere he'll stay for more than ninety seconds," Marin said, coming through with the last crate. "Which is nowhere. He's been casing the joint since six a.m."
"He's a business cat. He's doing inventory." Priya scooped him up anyway, and he went limp and enormous in her arms with the specific, theatrical indignity only cats can manage. "Okay. Talk to me. Are you panicking? You have the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have several faces, and this is the one from before your thesis defense." Priya set Dewey down on the window seat, where he immediately turned his back on both of them. "It's going to be fine. It's a bookshop reopening in a town of nineteen hundred people, not a Senate hearing."
"It's not the reopening." Marin pulled a stack of Cormorant Cove Reads!
flyers from the crate — Aunt Jo's old book club, which she'd promised herself she'd revive, if only because the alternative was admitting she had no idea what she was doing with the place.
"It's — everyone's going to be watching to see if I'm actually going to stay, or if I'm just going to fix it up and sell it in the spring. "
"Are you?"
"I don't know yet." It was the most honest thing Marin had said out loud since she'd arrived three weeks ago. "Ask me again in October."
Priya didn't push, which was one of the things Marin liked best about her.
She'd hired Priya on her second day back — or rather, Priya had hired herself, showing up with a resume and a fierce, slightly alarming amount of opinions about oat milk before Marin had even opened the till — and in three weeks she'd become the closest thing to a friend Marin had in town.
That, and Ivy Chen, who ran the flower shop two doors down and had already dropped off, unbidden, a bucket of white dahlias "for the counter, because a shop needs something alive in it that isn't the owner's caffeine addiction. "
By eleven, the shop looked like an actual shop instead of a construction site with delusions of grandeur.
Marin had swapped her paint-flecked jeans for something that could pass for professional, propped the door open properly this time, and set out a card table on the sidewalk with a hand-lettered sign — GRAND REOPENING, COFFEE'S ON THE HOUSE — that she was already regretting, because half of Cormorant Cove appeared to have decided free coffee was worth showing up for.
She recognized some of them. Mrs. Okafor from the post office, who used to save Marin the good stamps when she was eleven.
A man who might have been the same harbor master from twenty years ago or might have been his son.
A cluster of teenagers who clearly had no interest in books and enormous interest in the pastry case.
And, moving through the crowd with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once doubted his welcome anywhere, a tall, silver-haired figure in a blazer too crisp for a Tuesday morning, shaking hands, touching elbows, laughing at things before the punchline arrived.
"That's Prescott Vance," Priya murmured, appearing at Marin's elbow with the efficiency of someone who'd clearly been waiting for the chance to narrate.
"Town councilman. Big into the harbor redevelopment thing — the marina project, the fancy one, you'll hear about it approximately eleven thousand times before Thanksgiving.
He's basically Cormorant Cove's mayor even though we don't technically have a mayor. "
"Should I be worried?"
"Only if you're planning to build a marina.
Or say anything critical of the marina. Or exist near the marina.
" Priya's tone was light, but there was something underneath it — a wariness Marin filed away.
"He'll want to buy a book he'll never read, tell you three things about your aunt that may or may not be true, and leave. It's basically a blessing ritual."
She wasn't wrong. Vance arrived at the register twelve minutes later with a hardcover biography of some long-dead senator tucked under his arm, and a smile that had clearly been engineered for exactly this kind of room.
"Ms. Ashworth." He said her name like he was trying it on.
"Prescott Vance. I had the pleasure of knowing your aunt for — gosh, must be twenty-five years.
Sharpest woman on this stretch of coast. Terrible loss.
" He said it smoothly, the way people say things they've said many times before, at many funerals.
"Glad to see this place isn't going the way of half of Wharf Street.
You have no idea how many folks in this town were taking bets on whether you'd sell it out from under us before Labor Day. "
"I heard those odds were pretty good," Marin said, ringing him up.
"Were," Vance agreed, and something in his eyes sharpened just slightly, assessing her in a way that felt less like warmth and more like arithmetic.
"Some of us are glad to be wrong. This harbor's about to see a lot of changes, Ms. Ashworth — good changes, the kind that bring people up Wharf Street who wouldn't have come otherwise.
A shop like this, freshened up, right at the entrance to it all —" He gestured at the window, the view of the water beyond it, as if he owned that too. "Well. Timing's a funny thing."