The Story Of Us - Teri Wilson Page 0,5
out for him, hometown connections or not. He could do this, though. He had to. Living out of a suitcase and working on projects all over the country was beginning to wear on him. He’d spent the last three Christmases in three different cities, and he wasn’t sure he could even name them off the top of his head. He just needed to get to Waterford, convince the council to approve his plans for the redesign and then he could hightail it back to Portland.
Permanently.
Besides, it was only a few days out of his life. How hard could it be?
After breaking the news about the town council meeting to Aunt Anita, Jamie returned to True Love Books and did her best to put on a happy face. She unboxed the latest shipment of romance novels and put together a new Valentine’s Day display, complete with paper flowers she and Lucy had made one night while sharing a bottle of rosé. They’d used pages from vintage books to make the petals, and the end result was a dreamy bouquet of words, perfect to accompany the new selection of romantic reads.
Even Jane Eyre roses weren’t enough to make her forget about the blue flier tucked into the pocket of her dress, though. She kept taking it out and reading it again, just in case she’d missed some crucial detail.
None of this escaped Lucy’s notice, of course. The first few times Jamie succumbed to the urge to re-read the flier, Lucy didn’t say anything. She polished the glass cake stands on the bookshop’s café counter until they shone and busied herself with arranging pink-frosted cupcakes into a perfect pyramid, until she apparently could no longer hold her tongue.
“Maybe it won’t be that bad?” she ventured, peering over Jamie’s shoulder at the paper in her hand. Jamie had unfolded and refolded it so many times that it was beginning to look like bad origami. “I mean, the flier only says they’re discussing a project.”
Jamie turned to face Lucy and finally released the sigh she couldn’t hold in any longer. “This happened a few years ago in Tanner Falls. Some developers came in and said they were going to do some ‘improvements.’” Good grief, she was using air quotes. Caution: now entering full rant mode. “They wiped out all of the stores in the business district and then built them back up to look like something out of an H. G. Wells novel.”
Lucy’s eyes lit up. She’d always been a big fan of The Time Machine. Jamie sort of wished she had one of those, so she could go back to this morning and ignore her stack of mail entirely.
She held up a preemptive finger. “And not one of the cool ones.”
They weren’t talking The Time Machine. The developers had gone completely War of the Worlds crazy on poor Tanner Falls. It was almost unrecognizable. People who’d been in business for years no longer had a place in the trendy, new version of a town that no longer resembled itself.
“Well, if they do go forward with something like that, they at least have to buy you out.” Lucy gave her a tentative smile.
She had a point. Still, Jamie’s passion for her bookstore went way beyond the financial ramifications of being forced to close up shop. “But I’d still lose the store, and I’ve dreamed about owning this place since I worked here in high school. It’s the reason I fell in love with reading and writing and storytelling. I don’t want another store. I want True Love.”
This place had been a haven for Jamie, her own personal paradise, for as long as she could remember. She’d been just a little girl the first time she’d walked through True Love’s door, but the comfort of being surrounded by all those love stories was a feeling she’d never forget. Mr. Ogilvy, the prior owner, used to let her go there after school every day and read for hours. The first chapter book she’d finished, cover to cover, had been a beautifully illustrated hardback edition of Little Women. She could still remember the smell of its pages and the soothing weight of it in her hands, as if she’d been holding onto a whole new world of happy-ever-afters.
As soon as she’d turned sixteen, she’d begged Mr. Ogilvy for a job. She’d loved working at True Love so much back then, she would’ve done it for free.
She still would, if not for pesky little details like her mortgage, groceries,