Drowsy and mind-fogged, she crept downstairs to look for a book on Irish wildflowers. It took her a while to find anything that resembled the yellow flower, but eventually she found an image and description that matched: “Cinquefoil, a flower renowned for its healing properties and a flower also said to be favored by fairy folk. Meanings associated with it include money, protection, sleep, prophetic dreams, and beloved daughter.” She placed the yellow bloom in the coffee cup vase with the others. Henry Blake must have been right. The cat must be bringing them in. There wasn’t any other rational explanation.
Unsettled by her dreams and the unusual flower, Olivia couldn’t get back to sleep. She made coffee and sat in the window seat, watching the sunrise and wishing more than ever that Pappy was beside her, reminding her that nothing had happened yet today, and that everything was possible.
Ten
Ireland. Present day.
It was five weeks since Pappy’s funeral, four since Olivia had watched his words fly away across the sea and had taken off her engagement ring in a moment of reckless defiance. Still her future, and that of the bookshop, hung in the balance, and still the weeks slipped away too quickly beneath unpredictable skies. Days of moody granite clouds made way for days with skies the perfect blue of every child’s imagination. The weather had always affected Olivia’s mood, and she found it hard not to let her emotions sway from sunny highs to colorless rain-lashed lows.
As time marched on, Olivia’s life in London, and the future she’d been planning there, felt increasingly distant. She was surprised at how easily she had detached herself emotionally from it all, like a page come free of its bindings—part of the story that didn’t belong there in the first place.
Jack insisted, with increasing irritation, that she come home now. He said it was becoming difficult to explain her continued absence. “People are starting to ask questions, Olivia. It doesn’t look good.” She wasn’t especially surprised that he was more concerned about the clients he had to impress and the reputation he had to uphold than he was about their relationship. An absent wife-to-be didn’t fit within Jack’s carefully orchestrated life. It was awkward. Not how things were supposed to be. “My secretary is finalizing dinner arrangements for the Willoughby contract next week, and she needs to know if you’ll be there. It will be rather embarrassing for me if you’re not.”
With every conversation she tried to tell him about the letter, about her “condition,” but the tone of the exchange was always wrong, and the words escaped her. Her secret remained in only two places: her heart, and the drawer of her nightstand.
Through the ever-shifting weather and emotional turbulence, Olivia stuck resolutely to her task, working hard to learn the business of selling rare books. She visited house clearances, where substantial private libraries often yielded rare ex libris treasures. She contacted auction houses and specialist librarians. She studied websites and catalogs of other booksellers and, all the while, she continued to work on uploading Pappy’s catalog to the new website. Something Old held such treasures. She just had to find a way of connecting the right book lover or collector with the right book.
Even in sleep, there was no escape from the overwhelming responsibility to save the shop. In her dreams the books came to life, flying up from their shelves like a flock of seagulls startled from the sand, their pages flapping wildly beneath cracked spines, carrying them up and out of the open door where they swooped across the dazzling lights of the city, intending to settle on deserving nightstands, gifts for sleepy book lovers when they woke in the morning. Except the books never made it. Something interrupted them and they forgot how to fly, falling from the sky like shot game as Olivia watched, helpless. They landed in graffiti-covered skate parks and litter-strewn rivers and empty housing estates, until they were lost and ruined, and it was all her fault.
The sense of guilt and helplessness nagged at her as she opened the shop each morning and saw Pappy’s carefully collected books. Unread. Unloved. Beautiful narratives and prose trapped among their closed pages. She ran her fingertips along their spines, like a child running a stick along a fence. There was something pleasing about the rhythmic undulation of the smooth leather against her skin. Silently she promised Pappy she would bring customers to them, promised she would breathe life back into the shop’s hollow lungs, even if she didn’t know how.
THANKS TO A continual stream of correspondence between Olivia and Iris, the fairy-themed shop window bloomed like a summer garden. Olivia added greeting cards she found in the gift shop with Arthur Rackham’s classic fairy illustrations. She added several editions of Cicely Mary Barker’s Victorian flower fairy books she’d found in a bag of donations, and inscribed favorite quotes from fairy tales onto chalkboards. She watched people stop to admire the display, willing them to come inside, but it was Ross who first noticed the most curious addition to the window.
Olivia was cataloging a shelf of Irish Poets when she saw him outside, arms folded, face scrunched up in confusion. Ross was one of life’s quiet observers, so it was no great surprise to see him standing still, pondering. Olivia liked the way he made time to think. She liked the way he listened to her properly when they had their chats over coffee. She liked that she could tease him about trying to be one of the cool kids with his gig T-shirts and man-bun and the beanie he wore even on the warmest days. She liked him . . .
Lost in her thoughts, Olivia didn’t realize he’d seen her until he started to wave his arms around, beckoning frantically for her to come outside. Embarrassed at being caught staring at him and at how much she’d been thinking about him lately, she ducked behind the shelf and pretended she hadn’t noticed.
The bell jangled as he pushed the door open. “I know you’re in there, Kavanagh. Stop checking me out and come here for a minute. I want to show you something.”
Olivia grabbed a pile of books and stepped outside. “I was not checking you out. As if! I’m busy. What is it?”
“There.” He pointed at the bottom corner of the window. “Look at the fairy door.”
Olivia leaned forward to take a better look. A slender green shoot was entwined around the lintel of the little blue door. “That’s so weird. How did it get in there?”
Ross moved close beside her, their breaths misting up the window as they both stared at the fairy door. “Dunno. It’s pretty cool, though.” He tugged at Olivia’s sleeve. “There. Look at the window box.”
The plants in the window boxes had flourished beneath the mix of sunshine and rain in recent days. The one closest to them had sent out a shoot that had found its way through a tiny crack in the frame.
Olivia walked back inside and leaned into the window to take a closer look.
Ross followed. “Must be all your fairy juju working its magic. Here, take this before it goes cold.”
He passed Olivia the latte he habitually picked up for her now on his way to the shop, always with a different instruction written in black marker on the side: “Laugh.” “Dance.” “Fart.” Anything other than her name.
“And what do we have today?” she asked, smiling as she turned the cup ’round.