Chapter 2
Ellie
I shelved four books after he went upstairs.
I know it was four because I counted. Not intentionally — I don't make a habit of counting things when I'm perfectly calm and completely unbothered — but afterward I noticed I'd moved from Literary Fiction to Travel Memoir to Cookbooks to Young Adult without any logical progression whatsoever, which is the shelving equivalent of pacing, and I do not pace.
I'm a very settled person.
I put the Young Adult book back where it belonged and stood in the middle of the shop and had a very brief, very honest conversation with myself.
The conversation went like this:
That's Noah Calloway.
I know.
As in, the Noah Calloway. As in, the Calloway Literary Agency Noah Calloway. As in, the man whose submissions team sent you four sentences and a form letter and didn't even sign a name.
I'm aware.
And you shook his hand.
I did.
And you told him his sentences are beautiful.
That was—
Ellie.
That was the most restrained thing I have ever done in my entire life.
I knew who he was the moment he said his name.
Not from the books — or not only from the books — but from the photograph on the back of the one I'd shelved that morning.
The author photo was outdoors, some literary festival probably, he in a jacket that cost more than my monthly grocery budget with an expression that said he found the concept of smiling for cameras vaguely beneath him.
In the photo he looked composed. Deliberate. The kind of man who was very aware of how he appeared and had made his peace with appearing that way.
In my doorway he'd looked like someone had wrung him out and hung him up to dry.
Still recognizable. Annoyingly so. He had the kind of face that aged into itself — sharper than his thirties had probably been, a little weathered, dark eyes that moved around a room the way a writer's eyes do, cataloguing without seeming to.
I'd noticed all of that in approximately four seconds and then looked back at my books because noticing things about Noah Calloway was not on my agenda for today or any subsequent day.
His agency had my manuscript.
Had it, considered it, and returned it in the form of four sentences that didn't include a single specific word about the actual work.
I was not angry about this. I had processed it thoroughly three years ago and I was not angry. I was a mature adult woman who had moved on completely and was absolutely not standing in the Cookbooks section having feelings about it.
I went and made coffee.
The shop was quiet for a Wednesday afternoon.
A woman came in around three looking for a gift for her daughter — she's going through something, I don't know exactly what, she won't tell me, but she likes books where things work out in the end — and I spent twenty minutes with her and sent her away with two paperbacks and a bar of the good chocolate Jo kept behind the counter for situations like this.
A college kid came in looking for Hemingway. I pointed him toward the shelf and resisted the urge to also hand him something written in the last forty years. He's got time. He'll figure it out.
At four-fifteen the upstairs was quiet.
At four-thirty I heard footsteps. Slow. The particular rhythm of someone pacing, which was interesting, because the apartment was small and pacing in it required commitment.
At four-forty-five I heard them stop.
Then: nothing.
I told myself I wasn't listening and went back to the inventory spreadsheet Jo had left me, which needed updating and which I found genuinely soothing in the way only a well-organized spreadsheet can be, every item in its correct column, every number where it was supposed to be, a small contained world where everything made sense.
At five-ten, footsteps on the back stairs.
I did not look up from the spreadsheet.
The door from the stairwell opened. I heard him stop just inside it, the way people do when they enter a room and find it occupied and have to recalibrate.
"Sorry," he said. "I was looking for — you mentioned a coffee maker."
"Shop's closing in under two hours," I said. "So technically you're in the window."
"Is that a yes?"
"Kitchen's through there." I gestured without looking up. "Second shelf on the left. Mugs are above the machine. Filters are in the drawer."
A pause.
"Thank you."
He moved through to the kitchen. I heard the particular sequence of sounds that meant he was figuring out the coffee maker — the pause before the filter drawer, the slightly longer pause before he found where the coffee was actually kept, which was not the second shelf on the left, I had lied about that, it was the cabinet above the sink, I don't know why I said the wrong shelf.
I knew why. I just wasn't going to examine it.
"Cabinet above the sink," I said.
A beat.
"I was just about to check there," he said.
"Of course you were."
The coffee maker ran. I went back to the spreadsheet.
Outside, the rain had stopped and the late afternoon light was coming through the bay window at the angle that turned everything gold for about twenty minutes before it dropped behind the buildings across the street — my favorite twenty minutes of any day in this shop, the light doing something the building had probably never been designed for, just a happy accident of geography and time.
He came back through carrying a mug and stopped.
"That's something," he said.
I looked up.
He was looking at the bay window. At the light doing what it did.
"It happens every afternoon," I said. "Twenty minutes, give or take."
"You time it?"
"I notice it."
He looked at it for another moment. There was something in his expression I didn't have a name for yet — not the cataloguing look from earlier, something quieter than that. Something that looked like the beginning of missing something before you've lost it.
Writers, I thought. We ruin everything by watching it too closely.
Then I thought: you're not a writer.
Then I thought: stop it.
He pulled out the chair across from my counter — a reading chair, technically, one of the two I kept near the front for customers who wanted to try before they bought — and sat down with his coffee and looked out the window and said nothing.
I looked at him.
"Can I help you with something?"
"No," he said. "I'll be out of your way in a minute. I just needed to be somewhere that wasn't that desk."
"Writer's block?"
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more rueful than that.
"Something like that," he said.
I looked at him for a moment longer than I'd intended.
He was telling the truth. I could see it — not in any dramatic way, nothing performed about it, just the plain fact of someone who was exhausted in a specific way that had nothing to do with sleep.
I knew that exhaustion. I'd worn it myself for about six months after I'd moved the manuscript into the Misc folder and tried to remember who I was when I wasn't writing.
I did not feel sorry for him.
I did not feel sorry for him at all.
"There's a book," I said, before I'd decided to say anything.
He looked at me.
"On the third shelf from the window, left side. Green spine. A collection of letters between a poet and her editor, nineteen-fifties. Every time someone comes in here with that specific look on their face I give them that book."
"What specific look?"
"The one that says you've forgotten why you started."
He was quiet for a moment.
"And does it help?" he said. "The book?"
"I have no idea," I said. "They never come back to tell me."
Something shifted in his expression. And then — unexpectedly, briefly, like a window opening in a room that had been closed a long time — he smiled.
It was a real one. Not the author photo smile, not the literary festival smile. Just a man in a bookshop in the late afternoon light finding something genuinely funny.
It was, objectively, a very good smile.
I looked back at my spreadsheet.
"Mug goes in the sink when you're done," I said. "Not the counter."
"Noted."
He sat there for a while. Didn't talk. Didn't ask for anything. Just drank his coffee and watched the light change in the window until the twenty minutes were up and the gold went out of the room all at once the way it always did, like a curtain dropping.
Then he stood, took his mug to the sink — I heard the water run briefly, which meant he'd rinsed it, which was either considerate or a calculated move and I refused to decide which — and came back through.
"Goodnight, Ellie Voss," he said.
"Goodnight," I said. And then because I apparently had no self-control whatsoever: "It's Calloway Literary, isn't it. Your agency."
He stopped.
Turned.
Looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"Yes," he said. "Why?"
I met his eyes. Held them for exactly the right amount of time. Long enough to mean something. Short enough to deny it later.
"No reason," I said. "Goodnight."
He stood there for one more second.
Then he went upstairs.
I sat in the empty shop with the inventory spreadsheet open in front of me and the last of the afternoon light gone from the window and I thought about four sentences and a form letter and the way his smile had looked when it was real.
Then I closed the spreadsheet, put on my coat, and went home.
I was not thinking about it.
I was absolutely, completely, not thinking about it.