From there, I head to Goode Books, leaving Libby to call Brendan and do whatever else she wants during her treasured alone time.
Charlie and I exchange sharp-edged pleasantries and I pay him for a cup of coffee and then settle into my spot in the café, where I refuse to give him the satisfaction of glancing his way no matter how often I feel his eyes on me.
By the third morning, he has my coffee waiting by the register. “What a surprise,” he says. “Here at eight fifty-two, same as yesterday and the day before.”
I grab the coffee and ignore the dig. “Dusty’s giving me her answer tonight, by the way,” I say. “A free coffee isn’t going to change anything.”
He drops his voice, leans across the counter. “Because you’re holding out hope for a giant check?”
“No,” I say. “It can be a normal-sized check, just needs a lot of zeroes.”
“When I want something, Nora,” he says, “I don’t give up easily.”
Externally, I’m unaffected. Internally, my heart lurches against my collarbone from his closeness or his voice or maybe what he just said. My phone buzzes with an email, and I take it out, grateful for the distraction. Until I see the message from Dusty: I’m in.
I resist an urge to clear my throat and instead meet his eyes coolly. “Looks like you can forget the check. You’ll have pages by the end of the week.”
Charlie’s eyes flash with a borderline vicious excitement.
“Don’t look so victorious,” I say. “She’s asked me to be involved every step of the way. Your edits go through me.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?”
“It should. I’m scary.”
He pitches forward over the desk, biceps tightening, mouth in a sultry pout. “Not with those bangs. You’re extremely approachable.”
* * *
Most days I don’t see Libby until after work. Sometimes I even get back to the cottage before her, and she guards her alone time so jealously that every time I ask her how she spent those nine hours, she gives me an increasingly ridiculous answer (hard drugs; torrid affair with a door-to-door vacuum salesman; started the paperwork to join a cult). On Friday, though, she joins me around lunchtime with veggie sandwiches from Mug + Shot that are about eighty percent kale. With a full mouth, she says, “This sandwich tastes exceptionally unplugged.”
“I just got a bite of pure dirt,” I say.
“Lucky,” Libby says. “I’m still only getting kale.”
After we eat, I return to work and Libby turns her focus to a Mhairi McFarlane novel, gasping and laughing so regularly and loudly that, finally, Charlie’s gruff voice calls from the other room, “Could you keep that down? Every time you gasp like that, you almost give me a heart attack.”
“Well, your café chairs are giving me hemorrhoids, so I’d say we’re even,” Libby replies.
A minute later, Charlie appears and thrusts two velvet throw pillows at us. “Your majesties,” he says, scowl/pouting before returning to his post.
Libby’s eyes light up and she leans over to stage-whisper to me. “Did he just bring us butt pillows?”
“I believe he did,” I agree.
“Count von Lastra has a beating heart,” she says.
“I can hear you,” he calls.
“The undead have famously heightened senses,” I tell Libby.
Throughout the week, the rings around Libby’s eyes have faded, her color returning and cheeks plumping so quickly that it feels like those strained months were a dream.
In direct contrast, every day darkens the circles around Charlie’s eyes. I’d guess he’s having trouble sleeping too—I have yet to fall asleep in our dead-silent, pitch-black cottage before three a.m., and most nights I startle awake, heart racing and skin cold, at least once.
At precisely five, I close my laptop, Libby puts her book away, and we head out.
My concerns about Sunshine Falls disappointing her have largely come to naught. Libby’s more or less content to wander, popping into musty antique stores or pausing to watch an impressively brutal seniors’ kickboxing class in the town square.
Every so often we pass a placard proclaiming to be the site of a pivotal scene from Once. Never mind that three separate buildings claim to be the site of the apothecary, including an empty space whose windows are plastered with posters reading, RENT THE APOTHECARY FROM HIT NOVEL ONCE IN A LIFETIME! PRIMO LOCATION!
“I haven’t heard anyone say primo since the eighties,” Libby says.
“You weren’t alive in the eighties,” I point out.
“Precisely.”
Back at the cottage, she cooks a big dinner: sweet summer corn and creamy potato salad with crisp chives, a salad topped with shaved watermelon and toasted sesame, and grilled tempeh burgers on brioche buns, with thick slices of tomato and red onion, all smothered with avocado.
I chop whatever she tells me to, then watch her rechop it to her liking. It’s a strange reversal, seeing the things my baby sister has mastered that I never got around to. It makes me proud, but also sort of sad. Maybe this is how parents feel when their kids grow up, like some piece of them has become fundamentally unknowable.
“Remember when you were going to be a chef?” I ask one night while I’m chopping basil and tomato for a pizza she’s making.
She gives a noncommittal hm that could mean of course as easily as not ringing any bells.
She was always so smart, so creative. She could’ve done anything, and I know she loves being a mom, but I can also understand why she needed this so badly, the chance to be a lone person before she’s got a newborn attached to her hip again.
Like every night so far, we eat dinner out on the deck, and afterward, once I’ve washed the dishes and put everything away, we scour the trunk full of board games and play dominoes out on the deck, the strands of globe lights our only illumination.
A little after ten, Libby shuffles to bed, and I go back to the kitchen table to hunt through apartment listings online. Soon I have to face the fact of the wonky internet and give up, but I’m not even close to tired, so I stuff my feet into Libby’s Crocs and wander out into the meadow at the front of the cottage. The moonlight and stars are bright enough to turn the grass silvery, and the humidity holds the day’s heat close, the sweet, grassy smell thick in the air.
Feeling so entirely alone is unnerving, in the same way as staring at the ocean at night, or watching thunderclouds form. In New York, it’s impossible to escape the feeling of being one person among millions, as if you’re all nerve endings in one vast organism. Here, it’s easy to feel like the last person on earth.
Around one, I climb into bed and stare at the ceiling for an hour or so before I drift off.
On Saturday morning, we follow our usual schedule, but when I walk into the bookstore, I come up short.
“Hello there!” The tiny woman behind the register smiles as she stands, the scents of jasmine and weed wafting off her. “Can I help you?”
She looks like a woman who’s spent her life outside, her olive skin permanently freckled, the sleeves of her denim shirt rolled up her dainty forearms. She has coarse, dark hair that falls to her shoulders; a pretty, round face; and dark eyes that crinkle at the corners to accommodate her smile. The crease beneath her lip is the giveaway.
Sally Goode, the owner of our cottage. Charlie’s mother.
“Um,” I say, hoping my smile is natural. I hate when I have to think about what my face is doing, especially because I’m never convinced it’s translating. I wasn’t planning to stay long, just an hour or so to work through some more email before meeting Libby for lunch, but now I feel guilty using the Wi-Fi for free.
I grab the first book I see, The Great Family Marconi, one of those books fated to be hurled across a room by my sister, then picked up by me. Unlike Libby, I loved the last page so much I read it a dozen times before flipping back to the front. “Just this!”
“My son edited this one,” Sally Goode says proudly. “That’s what he does, for a living.”