Page 9 of A Novel Love Story

And it washumming.

I blinked slowly in a puddle of sunlight, forgetting for a moment where I was because the mattress was comfortable and the pillow smelled like fresh laundry. I couldn’t remember when I’d gone to sleep, though it was sometime after the rain had let up. That’s right—therain. With a start, I remembered: the storm, the bar, the grump, the loft above the bookstore.

I quickly sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. The loft looked different in the daylight. The cushions against the window seat were a bright mango, the hand-embroidered pillows stitched with the same color in blossoming wildflowers. The artisan had painted floral designs on the dresser, on the wardrobe, and around the floor-length mirror. Outside, the rain had given way to verdant foliage and strong redbrick buildings, interspersed with colorful colonial row houses and Victorian homes.

Faintly, I heard someone downstairs in the main area of the bookshop.

Anders?I checked the time on my phone, stifling a yawn—

Shit.

It was almost eleven! How had I slept for almostten straight hours? I had a cabin to get to and a vacation to start. Even if there was no one there to welcome me this year, pour me wine, sit with me in front of the stone hearth, and ask if I’d read this month’s club pick, I needed togetthere.

My phone still had zero bars. No Google Maps, no satellite, I was cursed to roam forever. Maybe there was Wi-Fi downstairs. I’d ask, and then once I left this no-name town and hopped back on the road, I’d figure out where I was.

Probably.

There—the humming again. So it wasn’t Anders.

A soft, warm breeze rustled the sheer white curtains hanging in front of the open window, a nest of starlings sang up a storm in the eaves above. I sat on the window bench for a moment, listening to them, watching them fly off and turn back again. The sound came from the birds. They could imitate anything. Pru was obsessed with that fact in the Quixotic Falls series.

“Of all the birds—she chosestarlings,” Pru had said. “It’s going to be important. I justknowit.”

To which I’d replied, “Just because fanfic ran with it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I can’t wait for you to be wrong,” she said, and picked a sweater out of a rack. We were shopping at her favorite secondhand store, trying to find vintage pieces for something. I no longer remembered what. “Rachel Flowers never puts in details for no reason. I’m telling you, it’s going to be important at the end.”

I had rolled my eyes and let Pru have her theories. I had my own,after all. There were a few plot threads that hadn’t been tied up in the fourth book, and rumors were the fifth one would be the last in the series. We were still waiting to see whether Junie and Will would open their inn, or if the grumpy possum would finally return to the café, if Maya Shah’s wish would come true, or if the magic of Quixotic Falls had finally run its course, with no more magic left to give.

It was all coming to a head like all good romantic epics did. I couldn’t wait to find out how everything tied up in a neat bow. It felt impossible. A magic trick for a magical series. I never would find out how Quixotic Falls ended, sadly.

A few months later, Rachel Flowers died. She was thirty-two. My age now.

After her death, it came out that she hadn’t planned the ending at all, and she’d told no one her ideas. Everyone was bereft. Not only for her, but for a happily ever after that would never come. A series, half a decade in the making, left without a proper ending. A story just stopped. No THE END. No epilogue to assure you that everything would be okay.

Nothing.

It was a year I’d rather not remember. Mom said that everyone had them, when your entire world is upended and you can’t seem to get your footing again. Except, I never found my footing again, and I’d been stumbling ever since.

I took a quick shower, which was a pity because the claw-footed bathtub wasgorgeous, and it would’ve been the loveliest bath, and pulled out my last pair of clean shorts and an old Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt that had somehow survived in my closet since the late nineties. I tucked it into my high-waisted shorts, slipped into my still-damp tennis shoes, and made sure that I’d packed everything into my duffel before I left the loft.

Anders was talking to someone at the front of the store as I came out of the loft. I paused at the top of the spiral staircase, and soaked in the view.

In the daylight, the bookstore took on a new life.

Motes of dust danced in the sunlight that streamed through the windows. It looked a lot cozier, as the colored glass window ornaments threw rainbows across the bookshelves and pirouetted across the hardwood floors like flecks of dappled sunlight on sand.

Bookcases, filled to the brim, reached up to the ceiling, cluttered with so many colors and kinds of books, short and fat, long and wide, that it almost felt like an assault on the senses. The center of the bookstore was open to the second floor, where tall bookshelves towered so high you had to reach them with ladders. Heavy oak beams supported the roof. Planetariums and glass chimes and other ornaments hung from the rafters, catching the morning’s golden light and throwing it across the store. The shelves were made from the same deep oak as the ceiling beams and the banisters on the second floor, signs hanging from the eye-level shelves detailing the different sections of the store:MEMOIR,FANTASY,SCI-FI,ROMANCE,SELF-HELP,NATURE,HOW-TO…

This place wasbeautiful.

I wondered, briefly, what it would be like to own a place like this. It was magical. A shop that sold the impossible inked onto soft white paper.

“You can try this instead?” Anders was saying in a voice I hadn’t heard him use before. It was tender, a bit sweet.

When I descended the stairs to see whom he was talking to, I could guess why.

A young girl—maybe eight, with warm brown skin and thick dark hair pulled up into a ponytail with a yellow ribbon—stood by the counter, a tattered book in her arms. The cover was missing,and the pages were bent and crinkly with water damage. The girl scrunched her nose at the book in question and then held out hers. “Can’t you just order another one, Uncle Andie?”

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