Chapter Thirteen

Eli

An uncertain tapping at the door woke me up, and I grunted, rearing my head from the pillows. Drool tracked from one corner of my mouth and there was a note on the bed. Someone was still knocking.

“Hold on, hold on,” I grumbled, swinging my feet and wrapping a blanket around my waist. I answered the door naked, swaddled in a long black train. Margot and Bethel stood on the other side of my door with concerned eyes. “What’s going on?”

“We met your friend,” Bethel began in a gentle, worried tone. “She had her ankle taped up and her skirt was a mess and she said she was going to work, but she looked terrible and something seemed wrong with her. So, we wanted to tell you, sweetie, in case.”

I nodded. They were right to tell me. Nina was like a horse running back into a burning barn. There was no way that Paper Treasure would be safe after last night, no matter how much she believed it was truly hers.

Less than ten minutes later, I was fully dressed and striding down the sidewalk toward Nina’s bookstore.

I didn’t notice that anything was wrong when I first jogged up those cracked cement steps, but the door was only halfway open when I registered the complete bedlam. There were books scattered all over the floor and bookcases at awkward angles on their sides.

“Welcome to Paper Treasure,” Nina’s bleak voice called from the back. “You’re going to have to excuse the mess. We’re… renovating. Just… take a look around, and let me know if you have any questions.”

I followed the sound of her voice to the back of the store, where she was curled up alongside the last fallen bookshelf. She summoned a feeble smile when she realized that her patron was me, but her eyes were still crusted with tears. “Oh, hey there,” she greeted me. “It’s you.”

“Nina,” I breathed, crouching down beside her. “What are you doing here?”

“I fired Will,” she explained simply. I had no idea who Will was, but it didn’t matter, either. What had happened was clear.

“Baby,” I soothed, spreading my palm over her knee and rubbing it back and forth. “You shouldn’t be here. This… isn’t your place.”

“Yes, it is,” Nina insisted, even while she was surrounded by all this proof that the store truly belonged to her father. “This is my store. Dad gave it to me. I’ve been running it for over a year.” Her eyes turned helplessly over the bedlam. “It gave me a reason to be proud of myself.”

I nodded and stood. I still didn’t believe this store truly belonged to her, that it ever had, but I would help her try to keep it. I would help her if it would make her happy.

“Do you think you can turn this place around?” I asked her, returning to a stand. “Do you think you can run it as an honest store?”

Nina pursed her lips together and glanced around. She nodded firmly. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“All right, then.” I strode over to the first bookcase that was knocked over and set it right. Nina stood and came to help. We did the next three bookcases together, even though I could have done them all by myself. What Nina needed was the belief that she could affect change in her world, and the best way to do that was by getting her hands dirty. I knew that firsthand. Righting the bookcases would give her back her sense of agency, even if I was helping.

In a matter of minutes, they were all vertical again, and the store already looked more hospitable.

“So, this Will,” I ventured. “He’s not coming back, is he? He’s not a big guy with guns or anything?”

“A little guy with glasses,” she corrected me, as if she was as baffled by his violence as I was about to be. “And a stammer.”

I recalled the Freak in the stocking cap with the stammer from a month or so ago.

“You need to be careful,” I warned her, stooping and picking up a handful of books. I sorted them by genre and then alphabetically by author, of course. I might own a bar, but I know my way around a library, too. “Will probably isn’t the only person in your life that you can’t actually trust anymore. If your father is the man I think he is—you’ve probably been surrounded by criminals for as long as you can remember being a part of his life.”

“Will said I would see what it was like to own a real store in Montclair now,” Nina whispered. “It was a threat. He said I would see what it was like without Dad’s protection.”

I nodded. That sounded about right, but it also sounded wrong. “Do you own the store outright? Is your father financially tied to it whatsoever?”

“Oh, yeah,” she answered me, casual as she stocked and organized books. She didn’t seem to realize the gravity of what she was saying. “I run the store, but he owns it. He could probably get rid of me completely if he wanted to.”

She froze, sliding a book halfway onto a shelf.

“He’s not going to get rid of you,” I promised her. My blood pressure ticked up at this turn in conversation. He’s not going to lay a fucking finger on you, I wanted to add, but this wasn’t the time. I didn’t want to scare her. “He wants to scare you. He wants you to feel like you need him in order to function. He wants to make you come back to the table and play ball.” It hit me with all the beauty and simplicity of absolute truth, and I knew that it was true because it had been my life before it was Nina’s: “He wants to break you.”

Nina’s head bowed forward and pressed against the spines of several hardback classics that she was in the middle of organizing. She whined to herself, that tiny, high-pitched, muffled sound that comes right before a good cry.

My mouth turned down, and I crossed the space between us in only three strides. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and bowed my head with hers, willing my strength to infuse her. What if all my pain existed to help heal hers? What if hers existed to heal mine?

“It’s okay,” I whispered against her neck, praying that the words would work. I didn’t want to see her cry in the middle of her ruined store. It was such a simple dream to have, and such a tiny thing to take from someone else, but I was certain that Jon-Pierre would take it. Underneath that gigantic façade, he was a tiny man. “Shh,” I murmured, rocking with her. “Don’t cry.”

But Nina twisted in my arms and locked her body around mine, burrowing her face against my chest. She let herself break and sob, and I held her strong. I didn’t focus on the sound of her crying. I didn’t let her pain get to me.

I focused on the solution to all of this misery in Nina’s life: the removal of Jon-Pierre Gusteau at all costs.

If Nina could see that, I might have a partner in this mission, at last.