Page 1 of The Library of Second Chances
One
Lucy
“Spill! You got another one, didn’t you?” Lucy Sullivan’s best friend, Taylor Donovan, screeched so loudly she scared off three seagulls roosting on the beach a few steps from them.
Lucy tried to suppress a bubbling feeling of excitement, instead taking particular interest in a pelican diving for its breakfast out over the water.
“They’re just book recommendations.” Looking down, she flipped over the pointed top of a conch shell with her toe, hoping to find the rest still intact, but it was only a fragment of the original shell.
Taylor grabbed the book Lucy was holding and skipped ahead, her long brunette ponytail swishing behind her. “They’re not just book recommendations.” She turned around to face Lucy and began walking backward. “No one else leaves notes in the library addressed to specific people.”
Taylor was referring to the Little Free Library Lucy had installed downtown after the town’s original library was forced to close due to lack of funding. It was for people to trade used books with others in the community. Lucy had the idea to leave index cards and pencils inside for those who left a book to write a note telling others why they might enjoy it.
Readers rarely signed their notes with their real name, instead making up fun monikers like “Hopeless Romantic” à laSleepless in Seattle. In a small town where everyone knew everyone, it had become a fun game to try to guess people’s monikers. Was Bob Newhouse, the carpenter and hardware store owner, secretly a fan of romance novels? She’d noticed the same male handwriting on notes left in Nora Roberts’s and Nicholas Sparks’s books, so it had to be a local.
As Lucy reached out to take the book back from Taylor, something fluttered from inside the novel and fell onto the sand. She managed to snag it as Taylor turned the book upside down and shook it to see if anything else would dislodge from between the pages. Lucy had already hidden the index card with its personalized note in her pocket before meeting up with Taylor, so she was surprised something else had been tucked inside.
“Ooh, what’s that?” Taylor returned to Lucy’s side, giving her a conspiratorial shoulder bump.
“It’s a map of Paris,” Lucy said, fighting the sea breeze to straighten out the map so they could both see. She tucked her shoulder-length blonde hair behind an ear to keep it out of her face.
“Not just any map of Paris.” Taylor jabbed a finger at one of the handwritten notes on the map, which said:Brasserie Flottes—best onion soup in Paris. “It’s apersonalizedmap of Paris.” She raised an eyebrow at Lucy.
Taylor was right. The map was filled with little arrows and notes pointing out restaurants, bookstores, galleries, and therewere even a few spots marked:Take a book here for the afternoon.
Lucy had been exchanging notes with a mystery user of the Little Free Library for a couple weeks. It had started after she’d left a copy ofGatsby’s Girl, anovel about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first love, who was thought to be the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan inThe Great Gatsby. The next time she visited the library, Lucy was surprised to find someone had attached a sticky note to a book addressed to her moniker: Island Girl.
Inside the book, there was an index card with a note referencingGatsby’s Girland a suggestion that she might like the novel they’d left,West of Sunset,which focused on F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The person thanked her for opening his eyes with the book she’d left, commenting that he knew what it was like to lose himself in a relationship the way Zelda had. He’d signed his note, Gatsby’s Ghost.
Lucy loved historical novels, so it had been easy to pick out another suggestion for her fellow reader, and she’d leftThe Paris Wife, a novel about Ernest and Hadley Hemingway. They’d been going back and forth like that for weeks now, plowing through books focused on the 1920s. Lucy had never met anyone who read as quickly as she did. One of the advantages to owning a bookstore was having plenty of downtime for reading.
“What did the note say?” Taylor asked as she turned the book over to look at the back cover description. It was a guide to the most beautiful walks in Paris.
Lucy reluctantly pulled the index card from the pocket of her shorts. Something about showing it to Taylor felt like sharing a secret she held with its author, but she reasoned that Gatsby’s Ghost had left it in a public place where anyone could have read it. She unfolded it and read out loud, “‘Island Girl, I don’t believe in bucket lists. If you want to do something, you should just doit. Until you can get to Paris, however—and youmustgo to Paris—enjoy this tour. Gatsby’s Ghost.’”
“Sounds like he wants to be yourtour guide,” Taylor said, grinning as she nodded at the map in Lucy’s hand. “How’d he know you’ve never been to Paris?”
Lucy shrugged. “It was in the note I put in the first book he read.”
“A man who listens. I like this guy already.”
“We don’t actually know it’s a guy.”
“I saw the handwriting on that last note. And ‘Gatsby’s Ghost’? Definitely a guy.” Taylor nodded. “It’s just so romantic. It’s likeYou’ve Got Mailbut in a Little Free Library.”
Lucy laughed. “Yeah, well hopefully he’s not here to open a chain bookstore and drive me out of business.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Lucy’s mind began racing. What if it was some guy in town scouting a spot for his chain bookstore in the new development that had been proposed? Construction had been halted for now, but she knew the town council was still trying to push their agenda of adding retail space on the downtown waterfront. If the last plans she’d seen were any indication, the only types of businesses that would be able to afford the leases would be luxury stores or big chains that survived on volume.
She shivered at the thought despite the warm June sun rising over the ocean to her left. “You don’t think that’s going to happen, do you?” Lucy’s eyes were wide when she turned to Taylor.
“Of course not.” Taylor reached over to rub Lucy’s arm as they continued their walk. “We fought the big bad developers and we won.” Taylor punched and jabbed at the air as if she were a champion fighter.
Enjoying her friend’s banter, Lucy looked out over the water. The sun had transformed from a fiery blur creeping up from thehorizon into a giant yellow ball in the sky in the short time it had taken them to walk down the beach. The best friends loved walking the beach when they could find time, starting from the marina at the edge of historic downtown Heron Isle and finishing at Lucy’s cottage, but lately they’d been too busy to do it often.
They continued walking along the tide line, the foamy edge of approaching waves nipping at their bare feet. The gentle lapping of low tide was a different tone altogether from that of high tide, which would come in a mere six hours, the sound of the waves reverberating off the dunes to create a noise that could drown out even the high-pitched shrieks of small children running into the water with abandon while their parents watched from nearby towels.
Thumbing through the book, Taylor stopped in a place where Gatsby’s Ghosthad underlined a passage and written a note in the margin. At first, Lucy had been horrified someone would defile a book in such a way, but she found she loved feeling as if she was reading along with a friend.
Next to her Taylor read out loud, “‘I learned you can love a city in much the same way you love a person. For me, Paris was love at first sight. I stood on the Pont Alexandre III spanning the Seine, and time stood still even though my heart was racing.’”
