Chapter 1
Noah
The GPS lost signal somewhere between the highway and a town called Birch Hollow and I took that as a sign.
Not a good sign. Just a sign. The universe communicating in its preferred language, which is inconvenience.
I pulled over on a two-lane road with trees on both sides and rain coming down at the specific angle that makes windshield wipers useless and I sat there with the engine running and my phone showing me a spinning circle where the map used to be and I thought about my editor.
Specifically I thought about the voicemail she'd left me at seven that morning.
"Noah. It's Dana. I've given you every extension I can give you. The manuscript is four months late. I need pages by the end of the month or we're having a very different conversation. Call me back. Or don't call me back and just send me pages. Pages would be better. Send pages."
End of the month was nineteen days away.
I had forty-three pages.
Forty-three pages in eleven months, which worked out to — I'd done the math, unfortunately — roughly four pages a month, or one page a week, or approximately one coherent paragraph every two days if you were being generous about what counted as coherent.
My last book had taken six weeks.
The one before that, four.
I used to write the way some people breathe — without thinking about it, without noticing, just a thing that happened because stopping it would require more effort than continuing.
My father used to say I came out of the womb with opinions and never once stopped having them.
He said it like a complaint. I filed it under evidence that I was doing something right.
My father died fourteen months ago.
I've written forty-three pages since.
The spinning circle on my phone resolved itself into a map. I was, apparently, twelve minutes from a town called Wren Falls, Vermont, which I had selected from a list of small New England towns with available short-term rentals by the scientific method of closing my eyes and pointing.
The rental listing had said: Quiet. Private entrance. Above a bookshop. No pets. No parties. Landlord works downstairs — please be respectful of business hours.
I did not have pets. I did not have the energy for parties. I had not been respectful of much lately but I was willing to try.
I put the car in drive.
Wren Falls was the kind of town that looked like someone had described a New England town to an artist who had never left the South of France. Everything charming, everything slightly too perfect, the kind of main street that made you feel like you'd wandered into a calendar photograph.
I drove through it slowly because the rain made the speed limit theoretical and because I was, against my will, noticing things.
A diner with a hand-painted sign. A hardware store with a rocking chair outside. A church with a marquee that said LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR and underneath in smaller letters, yes, that one too.
I almost smiled. I didn't, but almost.
The bookshop was at the far end of Main Street, set slightly back from the road with a bay window that had books arranged in it with the specific care of someone who thought hard about which books faced outward. A painted sign above the door: CHAPTER & VINE.
Below the main sign, a smaller one, handwritten:
We have the book you didn't know you needed. Come in and argue with us about it.
I parked. Sat for a moment.
The rain had softened to something more like mist. Through the bay window I could see the warm light of the shop interior, shelves going back further than the outside of the building seemed to allow, the way good bookshops always managed.
I grabbed my bag. Got out of the car. Went in.
The bell above the door made a sound like it meant it.
The shop smelled like old paper and something warm — coffee or candles or both — and for approximately four seconds I stood in the entrance and felt something in my chest loosen slightly, the way a fist unclenches when it's been closed too long and finally forgets what it was holding.
Four seconds.
Then someone said, from somewhere behind a shelf to my left: "Be with you in a minute."
The voice was unhurried. Certain of itself. The voice of someone who was not particularly concerned with whether I could wait or not.
I waited.
She came around the corner of the shelf carrying a stack of hardcovers that reached her chin, which she was managing with the practiced confidence of someone who had done this approximately ten thousand times and had developed opinions about the correct technique.
She was wearing a dark green sweater and her hair was up in the particular way that means it started the day down and got promoted at some point around noon.
She set the stack on the counter without looking at me.
"Looking for something specific or browsing?"
"Neither," I said. "I'm here about the apartment."
She looked up then.
She had the kind of face that communicated what it was thinking without necessarily intending to. Right now it was communicating: you're not what I was expecting.
I got that sometimes. The photo on my book jacket was three years old and considerably more put-together than I currently was. Unshaven, slightly damp, carrying the specific energy of a man who had been alone in a car for six hours with his own thoughts — I was aware I did not present well.
"Noah Calloway," I said. Extended my hand.
Something moved across her face. Quick. There and gone.
She shook my hand. Her grip was firm and brief, the handshake of someone who had decided how long handshakes should take and was not interested in debate.
"Ellie Voss," she said. "The landlord is my boss. Jo Maren. She's out this afternoon but she said to show you upstairs and give you the keys."
"Convenient."
"For you, maybe." She came around the counter. "Follow me."
The apartment was up a narrow staircase at the back of the shop, through a door that she unlocked with a key she'd had ready, which told me she'd been expecting me even if she hadn't been expecting me specifically.
It was small. Clean. A kitchen along one wall, a desk under the window that looked down onto the back garden, a bedroom through a door she gestured toward without opening.
"Bathroom's through there," she said. "Heat runs warm in the morning and cold at night, we don't know why, it's a character trait. The coffee maker is communal — there's one in the shop kitchen downstairs that you're welcome to use before ten, after that it gets complicated."
"Complicated how?"
"Book club Tuesdays. Staff lunch Wednesdays. General territorial disputes the rest of the time."
"Noted."
She was looking around the apartment with a slight frown, the expression of someone checking a mental list. Not looking at me. Which was fine. I was used to being the least interesting thing in a room full of books.
"Questions?" she said.
I looked at the desk. At the window above it, the garden below, the quiet. The particular quality of silence that existed up here above the shop — not empty silence, but layered. The sound of rain on the roof. The faint creak of the building. Something below, distant, a radio maybe.
A place, possibly, where a person could think.
"No," I said. "No questions."
She handed me the keys. Two of them, on a plain ring with a small enamel tag that said Chapter & Vine in the same font as the sign downstairs.
"Jo'll be in tomorrow morning," she said. "She'll go over the lease. There's a grocery store on Maple, diner opens at six if you're an early riser. The bookshop closes at seven on weekdays, eight on Saturdays."
"And Sundays?"
"We're closed." She moved toward the door. Paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at me with the expression I hadn't been able to place yet, the one that had flickered when I said my name.
"There's one of your books downstairs," she said. "If you want it. I just shelved it this morning."
Something in her tone. Even. Careful. The way you describe a meal you didn't enjoy to the chef who cooked it.
"How is it?" I asked.
She held my gaze for one beat too long.
"The sentences are beautiful," she said.
Then she left.
I stood in the apartment for a moment, listening to her footsteps go back down the stairs.
The sentences are beautiful.
In eleven years of publishing, four novels, two awards, and more reviews than I'd ever made the mistake of reading — I had never once heard a compliment that felt so precisely like an insult.
I sat down at the desk.
Opened my laptop.
For the first time in fourteen months, I wrote something that wasn't forty-three pages of nothing.
It was one line.
But it was honest.