stole the book?”
“I didn’t steal it. I wanted to trade. And I said sorry.”
“Did you?”
“With the coffee.”
“Speaking of,” he says, standing. “How do you take it?”
“What?”
“The coffee. I can’t sit here and drink alone, it makes me feel like an asshole.”
She smiles. “Hot chocolate. Dark.”
Those brows quirk up again. He walks away to order, says something that makes the barista laugh and lean forward, like a flower to the sun. He returns with a second cup and a croissant, and sets them both in front of her before taking his seat, and now they are uneven again. Balance tipped, restored, and tipped again, and it is the kind of game she’s played a hundred times, a sparring match made of small gestures, the stranger smiling across the table.
But this is not her stranger, and he is not smiling.
“So,” says Henry, “what was all that today, with the book?”
“Honestly?” Addie wraps her hands around the coffee cup. “I didn’t think you’d remember.”
The question rattles like loose change in her chest, like pebbles in a porcelain bowl; it shakes inside her, threatening to spill out.
How did you remember? How? How?
“The Last Word doesn’t get that many customers,” Henry says. “And even fewer try to leave without paying. I guess you made an impression.”
An impression.
An impression is like a mark.
Addie runs her fingers through the foam on her hot chocolate, watches the milk smooth again in her wake. Henry doesn’t notice, but he noticed her, he remembered.
What is happening?
“So,” he says, but the sentence goes nowhere.
“So,” she echoes, because she cannot say what she wants. “Tell me about yourself.”
Who are you? Why are you? What is happening?
Henry bites his lip and says, “Not much to tell.”
“Did you always want to work in a bookshop?”
Henry’s face turns wistful. “I’m not sure it’s the job that people dream of, but I like it.” He’s lifting the latte to his mouth when someone shuffles past, knocking against his chair. Henry rights the cup in time, but the man begins to apologize. And doesn’t stop.
“Hey, I’m so sorry.” His face twists with guilt.
“It’s fine.”
“Did I make you spill?” asks the man with genuine concern.
“Nope,” says Henry. “You’re good.”
If he registers the man’s intensity, he gives no sign. His focus stays firmly on Addie, as if he can will the man away.
“That was weird,” she says, when he’s finally gone.
Henry only shrugs. “Accidents happen.”
That isn’t what she meant. But the thoughts are passing trains, and she can’t afford to be derailed.
“So,” she says, “the bookshop. Is it yours?”
Henry shakes his head. “No. I mean, it might as well be, I’m the only employee, but it belongs to a woman named Meredith, who spends most of her time on cruises. I just work there. What about you? What do you do when you’re not stealing books?”
Addie weighs the question, the many possible answers, all of them lies, and settles for something closer to the truth.
“I’m a talent scout,” she says. “Music, mostly, but also art.”
Henry’s face hardens. “You should meet my sister.”
“Oh?” asks Addie, wishing she’d lied. “Is she an artist?”
“I think she’d say she fosters art, that it’s a type of artist, maybe. She likes to”—he makes a flourish—“nurture the raw potential, shape the narrative of the creative future.”
Addie thinks she would like to meet his sister, but she doesn’t say it.
“Do you have siblings?” he asks.
She shakes her head, tearing a corner off the croissant because he hasn’t touched it, and her stomach’s growling.
“Lucky,” he says.
“Lonely,” she counters.
“Well, you’re welcome to mine. There’s David, who’s a doctor, a scholar, and a pretentious asshole, and Muriel who’s, well—Muriel.”
He looks at her, and there it is again, that strange intensity, and maybe it’s just that so few people make eye contact in the city, but she can’t shake the feeling he’s looking for something in her face.
“What is it?” she asks, and he starts to say one thing, but changes course.
“Your freckles look like stars.”
Addie smiles. “I’ve heard. My own little constellation. It’s the first thing everyone sees.”
Henry shifts in his seat. “What do you see,” he says, “when you look at me?”
His voice is light enough, but there is something in the question, a weight, like a stone buried in a snowball. He’s been waiting to ask. The answer matters.
“I see a boy with dark hair and kind eyes and an open face.”
He frowns a little. “Is that all?”
“Of course not,” she says. “But I don’t know you yet.”
“Yet,” he echoes, and there’s something like a smile in