CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Inkwell Oswald, solemn; Tim, watching her with something like gratitude; Marin, near the register, feeling the whole shape of the last two months settle into something that finally made sense.
"I don't need anybody's pity now. I just wanted somebody to believe me.
Turns out that was never too much to ask.
It just took the right people finally asking the right questions. "
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Oswald, with the particular gravity of a man who had spent forty years choosing his words with librarian's precision, raised his cider mug an inch off the table.
"To asking the right questions," he said. "Late, perhaps. But asked all the same."
The whole circle raised their mugs and cups in return, and Marin, watching from behind the counter with Dewey warm against her ankles and the harbor going dark and silver beyond the windows, thought that this — this exact, ordinary, hard-won moment — was precisely what Aunt Jo must have meant, all those years ago, about a shop being the place in town where people finally said what was real.