“Oh, look! Annie’s books.”
“What?”
I stared through the window at the stacks of romance novels, with Ann Nichols’s new books at the top. The ones I wrote—Midnight Matinee, A Rake’s Guide—all of them. Dad walked by this bookstore every day on his daily lunch breaks to Fudge’s. He must’ve seen this display, these books. I wondered if he ever duckedinto the store and bought one. I wondered if Mom loved the dry humor in Nichols’s new ones. Mom and I never really talked about books after mine failed. I didn’t want to talk about books at all after that.
I turned to keep walking, when Ben backtracked and nodded his head toward the door. “Let’s go in.”
“Why?”
“Because I like bookstores,” he replied, and stepped backward through the closed door.
I had half a mind to not follow him, but a part of me wondered what section he gravitated toward. Literary? Horror? I couldn’t even imagine him in the romance aisle, towering and broody in his pristine button-down shirts and ironed trousers.
The bell above the door rang as I stepped into the cozy bookstore. The woman behind the counter, Mrs. Holly, had been there for twenty-odd years. She looked up from her book with a smile. “Well, I’ll be damned! Florence Day.”
Even my local booksellers back in Jersey didn’t know my name, but it seemed like a decade away couldn’t erase me from small-town memory. Everywhere I went it was “Holy smokes, Florence Day!” like I was Mairmont’s local celebrity. Well, I guess I was.
“Hi, Mrs. Holly,” I greeted.
“What’re you in for?”
Have you seen a ghost float through, by any chance? Six foot sexy, with just the slightest hint of nerd?I wanted to ask, but instead went with, “Just looking.”
“Could I help?”
“I don’t think so,” I began, before my eyes caught the pop-up on the counter forWhen the Dead Singby Lee Marlow. PRE-ORDER TODAY! the cardboard stand-up announced, with the picture ofthe cover—a run-down Victorian mansion with a Wednesday Addams–looking girl standing in front of it, unsmiling. From one of the windows peered a ghoul of some sort, demonic eyes and sharp teeth.
Riveting.
“The author must’ve never visited a small town before in hislife,” Mrs. Holly said when she noticed what had grabbed my attention. She shook her head. “One of my booksellerslovedit, though. I don’t get why.”
“Noted,” I replied.
Of course he couldn’t write small towns. He’d never lived in one—he thought every small town was either Stars Hollow or Silent Hill. There was no in-between.
“You write better than he ever could,” she went on.
I stiffened.
“You know I still sell your book! Not as often these days, but I do. It’s a pity it went out of print already. Barely made it to paperback.”
“I didn’t like the paperback anyway,” I replied with a bit of bitter humor, because the paperback had been so ugly I couldn’t imagine anyone picking it up on their own. You knew a publisher had given up on a book when they let their design intern make a book cover.
I told Mrs. Holly I wanted to browse, and made my way back through the aisles of memoirs and self-help, past sci-fi and fantasy, to the back corner of the store where the paperback romances were. And there was Ben, looking through the used romances with cracked spines and dog-eared pages.
“Weren’t you a horror editor?” I asked as I slid up to him. “Why’d you come to romance?”
“My imprint shuttered.” He attempted to take a book off theshelf, but his hand fell right through it. He frowned, having forgot, and sighed.
“That can’t be theonlyreason.”
“I read a book once that changed me. And I realized I wanted to help writers write more books like that, and find more books like that, and give them the chance they wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“Must’ve been a great book. Bestseller? Have I heard of it?”
His mouth twisted into a grin, as if I’d said something funny. “If I’ve learned anything as an editor over my last ten years, it’s that you never really hear of the good ones.”
I roamed my gaze across the shelves—the Christina Laurens and the Nora Robertses and the Rebekah Wetherspoons and the Julia Quinns and the Casey McQuistons—until my eyes settled on the most familiar spine. I took it out for him. There were only two on the shelf. I wondered how much longer Mrs. Holly would be able to stock it before she couldn’t find it anymore.Ardently Yours.