“What did you pick today, Abby?” Elle smiled across the counter at the little girl with brown pigtails as she slid a picture book up onto the counter.

“Llama, Llama, Red Pajama,” she said, her eyes bright with excitement.

“One of my favorites,” Elle said. “You must have liked Llama, Llama, Mad at Mama.”

Abby and her parents, Jason and Eileen, had been coming into the store since it opened, and Elle was always excited to offer recommendations of her favorite picture books to the little girl, clearly an avid reader-in-the-making.

“That one was a hit with Abby,” Jason said. He removed his wallet while Elle rang up the book. “Not to mention Eileen.”

Elle laughed. “Books solve all kinds of problems, don’t they?”

She wrapped the book in brown paper and slid it inside a bag. Then she took his credit card, rang up the purchase, and gave him a receipt.

“I’m looking forward to hearing your book review, Abby.”

Abby giggled and picked up the bag with one still-pudgy hand.

“Thanks, Elle,” Jason said. “See you next time.”

She smiled and waved, his words making her feel a little better. See? Just because Bolton’s was going to sell more books didn’t mean her customers would buy there. She just needed to have a little faith in what she’d built, in what she was still building.

“If you build it, they will come,” she murmured aloud as the bell on the door announced their exit.

She was clearing space on the counter when the bell rang again. She looked up expecting to see Zach for their Monday lunch, but it was a youngish man in a navy blue jacket and a baseball cap that somehow looked official.

“Hello,” Elle said, smiling. “How can I help you?”

He looked at a small brown package in his hand. “Elle Matheson?”

“I’m Elle Matheson.”

“I have a delivery for you,” he said, stepping farther into the store.

“Oh, okay.”

He pulled out an iPad and handed it to her. “Sign with your finger on the line.”

She followed his instructions and he handed her the package.

“Who is it from?” she asked, turning the package over in her hands. When she looked up he was gone, her question met by the sound of the bell on the door as he left. “Alrighty, then.”

There was no return address on the package, and she slipped her finger under one of the taped flaps and peeled off the brown paper. Her heart nearly stopped beating when she took in the cover, faded and yellowing, the jacket still intact.

The image of a boy standing at the edge of a planet surrounded by flowers and stars was intimately familiar to her, but she knew even before opening the cover that this was no ordinary copy of her favorite book.

She knew booksellers who wouldn’t touch it without gloves, but she wasn’t that kind of bookseller. She wasn’t interested in the resale value of the book. She just wanted to look at it. To feel the old paper between her fingers.

To marvel at it.

She opened the cover and her eyes fell on a slip of paper, the handwriting slanting across its surface as well-known to her now as it had been eight years before when she’d been a sophomore in college madly, deeply in love for the first — the only — time in her life.

Her heart hammered in her chest. When she turned to the copyright page she was unsurprised to find it was a French first edition.

She closed the cover quickly, as if that would somehow trap all the feelings welling up inside her like a storm.

She wouldn't deny that she’d been thinking about him. It wasn’t just the conversation with her mother the night before; he’d been haunting her ever since their accidental meeting, every moment of their passionate love affair coming back to her in painful and exquisite detail. Except now there wasn’t just the past to tempt her but the future.

Had they met for a reason? Was it possible to start again? To forget everything that had happened?

They were pointless questions. Letting go of pain was healthy and productive, but it didn’t mean setting yourself up to be hurt all over again. You could be a forgiving person and still protect yourself. Wasn’t that part of growing up? Learning not to touch the flame after being burned the first time?

She jumped as the bell on the door rang, half-expecting another package that would only elicit more complex emotions. But when she looked up it was Zach, carrying a brown paper bag and making his way around the tables stacked with books.

“Sorry I’m late.” He set the bag on the counter. “Brad was working again, and you know how he always chats me up.” He froze. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head, tried to smile as she started unpacking sandwiches and sides from Milton’s. “Nothing. And Brad has been crushing on you since he started a year ago. You should be used to the attention by now.”

“You are such a liar,” Zach said, pulling a stool over to the counter where they always shared their Monday lunch.

It had started as a way to brainstorm marketing strategy; being a small business wasn’t easy, even in a community that did more than most to support them. But their business lunches had quickly turned into coffee klatches between friends. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d talked meaningfully about business.

She wiped her hands on a napkin, just to be safe, and pushed the book toward him. “This was delivered right before you got here.”

He looked down at it suspiciously. “Can I touch it?”

She handed him a napkin. “Wipe your hands first.”

He sighed, wiped his hands on the napkin, then picked up the book.

“Are you taking up French?” He turned it over in his hands before returning to the front and opening the cover. “Time and distance changes nothing?” He looked up at her. “Is this from the hottie you were having coffee with last week?”

She took the book from his hands and set it behind her, then sat on her stool and started unwrapping her sandwich. “That would be correct.”

“Well, I’m famished. That bitch Ethan came in late today,” he said. “You talk. I’ll eat.”

She laughed. Ethan was a great worker, but he was almost always late for his shift, leaving Zack — and Katie, when she was working — scrambling to deal with the morning rush.

She hesitated while Zack dug into his sandwich. She hadn’t talked to anyone but her mom and her brother about Locke since college. Maybe it was time.

She talked while she ate, starting at the beginning: the way Locke had swept her off her feet, how he’d been different from anyone she’d ever met — bold and daring, unafraid to take chances, not just physical ones but emotional ones, too. Everyone else in college had been so afraid to be honest about how they felt, so intent on keeping up the charade of apathy. But Locke had been all in with her from the beginning, and she’d been surprised to find herself open up like a rose in sunlight.

Zack was silent through most of it, right up until she got to the part about his parent’s company being responsible for the loss of the original Matheson and Matheson. Right up until she got to the lie.

“Wait… so he knew his parents were strong-arming your parents and he didn’t say anything?” Zach asked.

She finished chewing, trying to get through some of her lunch now that he was asking questions. “He knew,” she said. “And he didn’t say anything.”

“Bastard!” His pronouncement was almost good-natured.

“Right?”

“Did you have a knockdown, drag-out fight?”

Zack was a drama queen. He loved knockdown, drag-out fights and swore the sex was better afterward, a fact that led to the end of his last relationship with a man named Ben.

“I don’t know if you’d call it that,” she said. “I think I was all out of knockdown and drag-out by then. My parents were losing their legacy. I was losing the place that meant more to me than the house I grew up in. And then my dad died and…”

“And?” Zack’s voice was soft.

She looked up at him. “I just couldn’t, you know?”

“Would it have been different if he’d told you?” Zack asked, balling up the wrapper to his sandwich. “Because the lie sucks, but the rest of it…”

“Wasn’t really his fault,” she said. “I know.” She thought about his question. “I don’t know if anything would have been different. Maybe in the moment everything was just too heightened. Too raw.”

“And now?”

“Now… I don’t know. I’m not sure what to make of the book or what he’s trying to say with it.”

“What do you want him to be saying?” Zack asked. “Or put more simply, did you still want to fuck him when you saw him?”

She laughed. “I was not thinking about fucking him.”

He looked skeptical. “I’m just saying: if you were thinking about going to bed with him your body knows what it wants even if you don’t.”

“Can you please stop?” She shook her head. “You’re unbelievable.”

He leaned forward. “I’m being serious, Elle. Sometimes the mind just confuses things.”

“So you think we should all just go around sleeping with the people we’re attracted to regardless of the consequences?”

He seemed to think about it. “I wouldn’t go that far, but I think deep down, we all know what we want. We try to talk ourselves out of it when it doesn’t make sense the way we think it should, but sometimes it’s better just to let something play out.”

“Let something play out?”

He nodded. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now.” He looked at the book behind her. “I don’t know as much about books as you do, but isn’t that kind of what that one’s about? I mean, the little guy didn’t know what would happen when he left his planet, right? And maybe things didn’t turn out the way he’d imagined, but it seems like he was meant to experience the story the way he did.”

She couldn’t help staring at him.

“What?”

“I’m just trying to figure out if that’s the smartest thing I’ve ever heard or the dumbest.”

He shrugged. “I’m an enigma.”

She laughed, but his words were already working their way through her mind.

You don’t have to have all the answers right now.

He made it sound so simple, and for the first time, she considered the possibility that he was right.