The bell above the door of Crowley's Used Books chimed twice, a thin bronze sound that Rosemary Beckett had not heard in this particular key since she was a girl tagging along behind her father on Saturday errands. The chime sat in her ear like a held breath. She paused on the threshold, one hand still pressed flat against the warm glass of the door, the other clutching the cloth handle of her market basket. The basket held a tin of lemon biscuits she had bought from Mabel Pratt and a list of errands she had already completed, which meant she was, as usual, making work for herself in order to avoid going home to a kitchen that still smelled faintly of yesterday's coffee and her father's absence.
Main Street on a Tuesday afternoon in early October moved at the pace of drying paint. Two doors down, the hardware store had its Halloween display half-stocked, plastic skeletons slumped against bags of fertilizer. Across the street, the dry cleaner had not changed its window signage since the previous administration. A single pickup truck idled at the curb outside the feed store, its radio playing something country and low. The sidewalk beneath Rosemary's sensible oxfords held the chalky residue of someone's spilled milkshake from the previous weekend, and she stepped around it with the unconscious precision of a woman who had been navigating this particular stretch of sidewalk for sixty-some years.
She told herself she was only walking. The wind had come up in the last hour, pushing dust devils of goldenrod seed and sycamore fluff down the street, and her arthritic left hip preferred the slight downhill slope of Main over the climb back up to the Beckett house on Linden. Walking was medicinal. Walking was a thing she could do without thinking about the folder in her father's desk, the one she had found three days after the funeral, the one that had rearranged the furniture of her understanding of her own family.
The bookshop door opened onto a smell she did not expect.
The old Crowley's, before the previous owner had passed and the windows had gone dark for nearly two years, had always carried the particular perfume of aging paper and cedar blocks and, faintly, of the cigarettes the old Mr. Crowley had smoked at the counter. That smell had been a fixed point in Rosemary's girlhood, like the brass arrow on the bank clock or the cracked tile by the post office steps. She had half-expected, walking past today, to smell the ghost of that particular blend, a melancholy comfort.
Instead, the shop smelled of fresh pine, and of coffee brewing somewhere out of sight, and of something green and herbal she could not quite place. Rosemary, who prided herself on her olfactory vocabulary after thirty-eight years of cataloguing the smells of bindings and dust jackets, found herself cataloguing this new combination with something between interest and unease.
The interior had been rearranged.
The long oak counter where Mr. Crowley had once sorted his receipts now sat crosswise near the back wall, repurposed as a display table. On it stood a row of hardcovers arranged by color, a tactic Rosemary associated less with used bookstores and more with the kind of curated shops she had seen in magazines aimed at restless urbanites. The rolling ladder had been moved to the middle aisle. The wire spinner rack of mass market thrillers had vanished. In its spot stood a wire-frame bookcase shaped like an Eiffel Tower, which struck Rosemary as both clever and faintly ridiculous.
And there was a man at the window.
He had his back to her. He was rearranging a display of vintage paperbacks in the wide front window, his shoulders blocking the late afternoon sun. He was tall, considerably taller than Rosemary had expected the new owner of a small-town used bookshop to be. He wore a dark wool cardigan over a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his hair was dark, almost black, and cut shorter than was fashionable in town. He was handling the paperbacks with the careful attention of a man who had been told they were valuable, or who had decided they were valuable, or both.
Rosemary did not announce herself. She had the librarian's instinct to observe before being observed, and she took a moment to take him in: the breadth of his shoulders, the way he leaned into the window display with one hand braced on the sash, the way the late sun caught the silver at his temples. He was not, she decided, a young man. There was something settled about the way he held himself, the way he considered each paperback before placing it. Not young. Not, perhaps, as old as her.
She took a step forward. The floorboard she chose had been a quiet one for forty years. It betrayed her with a decisive creak.
He turned.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The man in the window was handsome in a way Rosemary associated with certain portraits in certain secondhand books, the kind of weathered, thoughtful handsomeness that required a viewer to look past the years to the bones underneath. His eyes were a clear, startling grey-green, the color of lake water just before dusk. He blinked at her once, twice, and then a smile broke across his face that was warm and slightly lopsided and altogether too charming for a Tuesday afternoon on Main Street.
"Afternoon," he said. His voice had the easy, unhurried cadence of a man who had lived in cities and learned to slow himself down for small towns. "Come in. The door was open for a reason, even if it was a small one."
"It was," Rosemary agreed. She set her basket down on the nearest flat surface, which happened to be a stack of National Geographics. "I heard the bell. I had forgotten there was a bell."
"There are three of them, actually," he said, stepping away from the window and wiping his hands on the seat of his trousers in a gesture so unconscious and so masculine that Rosemary's late husband would have approved. "Different sizes. The smallest one sounds like a sparrow with a grudge. The biggest one sounds like a conscience. This one here, in the middle, sounds like a question you forgot to ask."
"That is a very literary description for a piece of hardware," Rosemary said.
He laughed. The laugh was real, low, slightly rough, and Rosemary decided she had been too quick with her initial assessment. "Guilty. I spent too many years in a town where that sort of thing passed for conversation. Seattle. I only just moved down. Three weeks and a half, if you want to be specific. I am told specificity is appreciated around here."
"Around here," Rosemary said, "specificity is expected. Vagueness makes people suspicious."
"Noted." He extended a hand across the National Geographics. "Theo Crowley. I bought the shop from Mr. Crowley's estate. I am, technically, no relation to the previous Crowley, though the name has occasioned several conversations at the post office."
Rosemary took his hand. His grip was firm, his palm dry and warm. "Rosemary Beckett. I have lived in this town since before you were born, probably."
"Almost certainly," he agreed. "I am forty-six. You are, if I may say so without giving offense, considerably older than I am and considerably more likely to know where the fuse box is."
"The fuse box is behind the soda fridge," Rosemary said. "And you will want to label it before winter. The wiring in this building has opinions."
"I have already learned that the wiring in this building has entire op-ed pieces." Theo Crowley released her hand, gestured around the shop with a proprietary sweep of one arm. "What do you think? I have been working on the window display for three days. I think I have finally achieved the right balance of melancholy and accessibility."
Rosemary turned to consider the window. The paperbacks he had been arranging were, she saw, mostly mid-century literary fiction in their original dust jackets. A battered copy of "The Man in the High Castle" leaned against a pristine "Franny and Zooey." A faded "Catch-22" sat beside a near-new "A Confederacy of Dunces." It was a clever display. It was also, Rosemary thought, a display that assumed the window-shopper had read at least three of these books and felt tender about them.
"It is clever," she said. "It is also a little obscure for a town that mostly buys Westerns and true crime."
"Noted," Theo said again, and this time there was a glimmer of something appreciative in his grey-green eyes. "I have a stack of Louis LAmour under the counter for the regulars. And a stack of Karin Slaughter for the ladies who come in on Saturdays. But the window is for the people who think they might come into a bookshop. I want to catch them before they walk on by."
"You want to catch them," Rosemary repeated. "That is a very particular phrase."
He tilted his head at her. "It is a very particular profession."
He moved behind the counter, and Rosemary took the opportunity to study the space more carefully. The shelves had been reorganized by category and then by size within each category, a librarian's instinct that made her relax fractionally. The fiction was sorted A to Z. The poetry was in its own alcove near the front, which was exactly where her father had always insisted poetry belonged. The local history section had been expanded, and she noticed a small, hand-lettered sign that read "Letters Ephemera" propped beside the cash register.
"Letters," she said aloud.
"Letters," he confirmed. "Local history is mostly letters, if you think about it. People write letters, and then people find the letters, and then the letters become history. There is a man in Seattle, a professor, who has been trying to get me to write a book about a single small-town correspondence for about fifteen years. I keep telling him there is no book in it. He keeps sending me notes."
Rosemary's hand, which had been reaching absently toward the poetry alcove, paused in midair. "What sort of notes?"
"Encouraging notes," Theo said. "Discouraging notes. Notes written on napkins. Notes written on the inside of paperback covers. He is a man of considerable patience and poor handwriting."
"I see," Rosemary said. She did not, entirely, see. But she filed the phrase away in the part of her mind she had once used for cataloguing reference requests that required further investigation.
"I should not have brought it up," Theo said, leaning his elbows on the counter in a posture that was casual and intimate at once. "I have been told I talk too much about my work, and about Seattle, and about things I should probably leave in Seattle. The thing about moving to a small town is that one forgets which stories are interesting and which stories are merely embarrassing."
"What stories are embarrassing?" Rosemary asked, because she had been a librarian long enough to know that the question, not the answer, was the thing.
He looked at her for a long moment. The late sun had moved off his shoulders and onto the floor, and in the changed light his face looked older, more lined. "Stories," he said, "about letters one wrote a long time ago, and did not send, and wishes one had sent, and is no longer certain one should have sent."
The shop was very quiet. The wind outside had picked up. She could hear the small brass bell above the door shiver faintly in the draft, although the door was closed.
"That," Rosemary said carefully, "is a very specific sort of embarrassment."
"It is," he agreed. "And I have not been in town long enough to have earned the right to inflict it on anyone. Forgive me. Occupational hazard. I have been sorting other people's correspondence for so long that my own correspondence starts to leak out at inconvenient moments."
She considered him. She considered the wire-frame Eiffel Tower. She considered the hand-lettered sign that said "Letters Ephemera," and the way he had said the word letters, and the folder in her father's desk, and the three days she had spent reading the same page of that folder over and over because she could not quite believe what it said.
"You are selling the letters," she said. "Or some of them."
"I am considering it," he admitted. "There is a market, apparently, for small-town correspondence of a certain vintage. I have been offered a sum of money for a single letter that would make your hair curl, and I have not yet decided whether to take it."
"Whose letter?" Rosemary asked. Her voice was very even.
He looked at her again. The grey-green eyes were steady, and there was something in them that Rosemary recognized, although she could not immediately have said what.
"A letter," he said, "that was written by a man who lived in this town, a long time ago, to a woman he ought not to have been writing to. The letter was never sent. The woman found it anyway."
Rosemary set her basket down on the National Geographics. She did not say anything for a long moment. The wind pushed a dried leaf against the front window. The little brass bell shivered.
"I see," she said at last.
"You see," he agreed. "And now you are going to tell me, with great courtesy, that it is none of my business, and you are going to walk out of my shop, and you are going to go home and think about whether you ought to come back."
"I was not going to say any of those things," Rosemary said, mildly. "I was going to ask if you had any tea. I am suddenly very much in need of a cup of tea."
Theo's eyebrows rose, just a fraction, and Rosemary thought she detected the smallest softening at the corners of his mouth.
"Tea," he said. "I think I have tea. It may be older than some of the correspondence, but I have it."
"Older tea is often better tea," Rosemary said, surprising herself. She had not expected to make a joke. The joke sat in the air between them like a small bird that had not yet decided whether to stay.
He moved toward the back of the shop, and she followed, past the stacks of National Geographics and the shelf of water-damaged encyclopedias and a cardboard box labeled MISC. which appeared to contain, among the other things, a teapot without a teapot's partner, a mug from a hardware store in a town called Elkhorn, and a spoon bent into a shape that suggested it had once been used for something other than stirring.
He disappeared through a doorway hung with a faded curtain, and Rosemary heard the small sounds of a kettle being filled, the click of a burner. She stood among the books and smelled the particular smell of old paper, which she had loved since she was a girl, since her father had first let her walk through the aisles of the library with her hand trailing along the spines.
A name. The name had been there, in the folder, in her father's careful handwriting on the outside of the manila envelope. THEO CROWLEY. And underneath it, in his own hand, CORRESPONDENCE, 1948-1974.
She had read the name and felt nothing in particular at first. Then she had thought, with a small start, that she had heard the name before. That it was familiar in the way a song is familiar when you cannot place where you heard it. She had turned the envelope over in her hands, and her father had been three days dead, and the house had been very quiet, and the refrigerator had been humming in the way that refrigerators hum when there is no one to talk to them.
"Crowley," she said now, aloud, to the empty shop. The little brass bell shivered again at a draft from the street, as if in answer.
Through the doorway came the sound of a kettle beginning to sing.
When Theo came back, balancing two mugs with the practiced ease of a man who had done this often, Rosemary was standing in front of the shelf where the man had placed the National Geographics. He set the mugs down on the nearest clear surface, which was a stack of old phone books, and looked at her.
"I recognize that look," he said. "It is the look of a person who has remembered something they wish they had remembered sooner."
"My father," Rosemary said, and stopped. She did not usually begin sentences she could not finish, but the sentence had been begun, and the tea was warm in her hands, and the shop smelled of paper and dust and a faint sweetness that might have been the old National Geographics.
"Your father," Theo said, encouragingly.
"My father had a folder," Rosemary said. "In his desk. I found it after he died."
There was a silence. Theo did not fill it. Rosemary was grateful to him for that. People often filled silences because they thought they ought to, and she had never been able to see the sense in it. A silence, she had always thought, was a thing you could put something into later, like a jar.
"A folder," Theo said, at last, when he understood she was not going to say more. "With my name on it."
"With your name on it," Rosemary confirmed. "And the word CORRESPONDENCE, and a range of years."
Theo sat down on the edge of a chair that might once have been part of a parlor set, and he did not say anything for a moment. The kettle, somewhere behind the curtain, clicked off. The shop settled around them like a house at the end of a long day.
"Well," he said, finally. "That is one of the things I have been waiting to find out."
"You have been waiting to find out," Rosemary repeated. She had not meant for it to come out as a question, but it did, and she did not try to correct it.
"I have been writing letters to your family for thirty years," Theo said. "Your father. Your aunt, before she passed. Your uncle in Milwaukee. I have sent a letter every six months like clockwork, and I have received a letter back every six months like clockwork, and not one of them, in all that time, has ever mentioned the folder."
"We did not know about the folder," Rosemary said.
"You did not know," he said, "or your father did not know?"
"We did not know," Rosemary said, firmly. "My father did not know. I am certain of it."
Theo looked at her for a long moment. The grey-green eyes were very steady, and Rosemary thought again that there was something familiar in them, something she recognized. She could not have said what.
"You purchased this shop," she said, slowly. "At the estate sale. Last spring. I remember. The whole town talked about it. Someone from out of town buying the old Beckett place."
Something moved across Theo's face. It might have been surprise. It might have been something else.
"Beckett," he said. "That was the name on the deed."
"My grandmother's name," Rosemary said. "Eleanor Beckett. She ran the shop until she was eighty-three. My father was her only child, and he never wanted the shop, and when she died, the building went to the family, and we have been renting it out, or letting it sit empty, or using it for storage, ever since."
The shop, Rosemary thought, had been her grandmother's whole world. Eleanor had been a serious woman with a dry wit and a love of crossword puzzles, and she had run the shop with a quiet efficiency that Rosemary had always admired. She had died when Rosemary was twenty-six, and Rosemary had not been there. She had been at a library conference in Indianapolis, and the call had come in the middle of a panel discussion on the digitization of rural newspaper archives, and she had stepped out into the hallway and heard her father's voice, and her knees had given way, just for a moment, against the carpeted wall.
"You purchased this shop," Rosemary said, "from the estate of a Beckett."
"From the estate of a woman named Beckett," Theo said, carefully. "Eleanor Beckett, yes. That is the name on the deed."
"That was my grandmother," Rosemary said.
Theo was quiet for a moment. The wind pushed at the front window again, and the brass bell shivered, and the smell of tea was warm in the air between them.
"Well," he said, at last. "That is a small world."
"It is a small town," Rosemary said.
"It is," he agreed. "And it appears to be smaller than I had thought."
Rosemary set her mug down on the stack of phone books. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. She had expected them to shake, and they did not.
"You have been writing letters to my family," she said. "For thirty years. About a correspondence that is older than I am."
"Older than you, and older than me," Theo said. "The original letters were written in the late forties, and the early fifties. By a man who lived in this town, to a woman who lived in this town. The man was a friend of my father's. My father kept the letters after the man died, and passed them to me when he was dying himself, and I have been trying, for thirty years, to find out what happened to the woman."
"And have you?"
"Not yet," Theo said. "I have found out a great many things about her. I have found out that she had a daughter. I have found out that the daughter had a son. I have found out that the son had a daughter of his own. I have found out that the daughter of the son is the woman who is sitting in my shop drinking my tea."
Rosemary looked at him.
"The woman in the letters," Rosemary said, slowly. "The woman the letters were written to. The woman who found the letter that was never sent."
"Yes," Theo said.
"That was my grandmother," Rosemary said.
The brass bell shivered again. The wind had picked up outside, and she could hear it moving through the street, through the bare branches of the elms, and she could hear the soft settling of the building around them, as if the shop were clearing its throat.
"That was my grandmother," Rosemary said, again, because the words were strange in her mouth and she wanted to be sure they were true. "Eleanor Beckett."
"Yes," Theo said.
Rosemary picked up her mug again. The tea was still warm. She held it in both hands, the way her mother had taught her to hold a warm mug on a cold day, with both hands, as if it were something precious.
"Then I have something to show you," she said.
She reached into the basket, which was still sitting on the National Geographics, and she took out the manila envelope. THEO CROWLEY. CORRESPONDENCE, 1948-1974. Her father's careful handwriting.
She held it out to him. He did not take it immediately. He looked at it, and she watched the recognition move across his face like a small light crossing a window.
"That is the folder," he said.
"That is the folder," she said.
He took it from her, very carefully, as if it were a sleeping child. He opened it, and she watched him look at the first page, and she watched his face change.
"Rosemary," he said, after a long moment. "Where did your father get these?"
"I do not know," Rosemary said. "He never mentioned them. I found them three days after he died, in the back of his desk, in a folder he had marked with your name and the word CORRESPONDENCE."
"And you read them," he said.
"I read some of them," she said. "I have not yet read all of them."
He nodded. He set the folder down on the stack of phone books, very carefully, and he looked at her, and the grey-green eyes were very bright.
"May I," he said, and stopped.
"May you what?" Rosemary asked.
"May I read them," he said. "Here. Now. With you."
Rosemary looked at him. He had been writing letters to her family for thirty years. He had purchased her grandmother's shop without knowing it was her grandmother's shop. He had a folder of letters that had been kept by her father, in secret, for who knew how long. He had come to this town, and he had bought this shop, and he had been waiting.
"Yes," Rosemary said. "You may."
He sat down on the edge of the chair that might once have been part of a parlor set, and he opened the folder, and Rosemary sat down across from him, and the wind moved through the bare branches of the elms outside, and the shop smelled of old paper and tea and something else, something Rosemary could not immediately name, and she thought it might have been the smell of two strangers realizing they were not strangers at all.
She picked up her mug. She sipped her tea. She waited.
Theo Crowley turned the first page of the folder with the delicate precision of a man who had learned, over decades, that paper was a thing that could be wounded. Rosemary watched his fingers. They were long, the knuckles slightly swollen, the nails trimmed close, and there was a faint tremor in them that he did not attempt to hide. He read the way she had always imagined her father must have read: slowly, with pauses, occasionally glancing up at nothing in particular, as if the words had weight and he needed to set them down before he could lift the next ones.
The shop was very quiet. The wind had gone out of the elms for a moment, and the only sound was the faint creak of the old wooden floor settling, and the small papery noise of Theo turning pages. Rosemary sipped her tea. It had gone lukewarm, but she did not mind. She found that she was not thirsty so much as she wanted something to do with her hands, and the mug gave her hands a task.
After several minutes Theo set the first page down on his knee and looked at her.
"Your father," he said, and his voice was rough, "had a remarkable hand."
"He did," Rosemary said.
"He crossed his sevens," Theo said. "With a little line through them. Like an old shopkeeper."
"My grandmother did the same," Rosemary said, and was surprised at the steadiness of her own voice, and at the way the surprise did not quite reach her throat.
Theo looked at the page again, and then he set it carefully back into the folder, face up, and he closed the folder, and he pressed his palm flat against it, and he looked at her again.
"I am not going to read them all now," he said. "I am not going to read them all today. I think your father wrote them in a particular order, and I think the order matters, and I think he would want me to read them at the pace at which they were written, or at the pace at which he saved them, and I do not yet know which pace that is."
Rosemary nodded. She had not expected this. She had expected him to devour them, or to weep over them, or to ask her a hundred questions. She had not expected him to set the folder down and speak of pace.
"Take it home with you," she said. "Tonight. Read what you can. Bring it back."
"No," he said. "Not yet. I think your father kept them in a certain place, and I think the place was part of them. Let me come back. Let me come back a few times. Let me read them here."
"You want to read them here," Rosemary said.
"I want to read them where I can hear the wind in the elms," he said. "I want to read them where the shop smells the way it smells. I want to read them in the chair I think your grandmother sat in. I want to read them the way your father would have wanted me to read them, which is, I think, the way your grandmother would have wanted him to read them, which is to say, slowly, and with the windows open if it is warm, and closed if it is cold, and with a cup of something terrible within reach."
Rosemary looked at him. She looked at him for a long time.
"The instant coffee is particularly terrible," she said.
"I noticed," he said. "I drank it anyway."
"You drank it because you wanted something to do with your hands," Rosemary said.
"Yes," he said. "Among other reasons."
"What were the other reasons," Rosemary said.
He looked at her, and the grey-green eyes were very still.
"Because it was offered," he said. "Because it was offered, and because the person who offered it was sitting in the same room as the letters, and because I had been waiting a long time to be in the same room as the letters and the person who was sitting with them."
Rosemary looked at him. She felt the weight of the mug in her hands, the slight unevenness of the glaze against her palm, the warmth of the tea that had gone lukewarm. She felt the floorboards under her feet, and the faint draft from the window, and the smell of the shop, which was, she realized, the smell of paper and tea and a particular kind of dust, and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that the smell was the smell of her grandmother's hands, and of her father's hands, and now, faintly, of this man's hands too.
"All right," she said. "Come back. Read them here."
"Thank you," he said.
He stood up. He picked up the folder. He set it back on the stack of phone books, in the exact spot from which he had taken it, and he aligned it with the edge of the stack, and he smoothed the front of it with his palm, and Rosemary watched him do this, and she understood that he was not arranging a folder so much as he was acknowledging an arrangement that had been made long ago.
"I should let you go," he said. "You have a satchel. You came in with a purpose."
"I came in to look around," Rosemary said. "I did not expect to find you."
"Nor I you," he said.
He looked at her satchel, which was slung over the back of the chair, and then he looked at her, and his expression was the expression of a man who was about to ask a question he had decided not to ask, and then who had decided to ask it after all.
"Are you a collector," he said. "Of letters, I mean. The satchel. It looked heavy."
Rosemary looked at him. She had been ready for many questions. She had not been ready for this one, and she found that she did not have a ready answer.
"I am a librarian," she said. "Retired. I have a habit of carrying things I am not yet ready to put down."
"The letters," he said.
"Among other things," Rosemary said. "Books, sometimes. Magazines, occasionally. A poem I have been trying to give away for twenty years and cannot."
"A poem you are trying to give away," he said.
"It is a very good poem," Rosemary said. "But it is not mine to keep. And I have not yet found the person to whom it belongs."
He looked at her, and the grey-green eyes were very bright, and very still.
"Perhaps you will," he said.
"Perhaps," she said.
He nodded. He picked up his coat from the back of the chair where he had folded it. He put it on. He buttoned it. He looked at her one more time, and then he looked at the folder, and then he looked at her again.
"Rosemary," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"Thank you for the terrible coffee," he said.
"You are welcome," she said.
"Thank you for the letters," he said.
"You are welcome," she said.
"Thank you for sitting with me while I did not read them," he said.
"You are welcome," she said.
He smiled, and the smile was small and tired and very real, and he turned, and he walked to the door of the shop, and he opened the door, and the wind came in, and the chimes rang, and he stepped out into the street, and the door closed behind him, and Rosemary was alone in the shop with the folder and the phone books and the mugs and the wind in the elms.
She sat down. She picked up her tea. She sipped it. It was cold now. She drank it anyway.
She sat for a long time.
She thought about the folder. She thought about her father's hand. She thought about the way Theo Crowley had pressed his palm flat against the folder, as if he were steadying a small boat, or a small heart, or a small, very old, very patient thing that had been waiting to be steadied.
She thought about the poem in her satchel. She thought about the fact that she had been trying to give it away for twenty years. She thought about the fact that she had not yet found the person to whom it belonged. She thought about the fact that the man who had just left her shop had asked her if she was a collector, and that she had answered him truthfully, and that the truth had been more complicated than she had expected.
She thought about her grandmother. She thought about her father. She thought about the way her father had kept the folder in the back of his desk, marked with Theo's name and the word CORRESPONDENCE, and she thought about the way her father had never mentioned the folder, and she thought about the way her father had, perhaps, not needed to mention it because the folder had been, in some way he had trusted her to understand, a part of the house, and a part of the family, and a part of the long, patient arrangement that had been made between two strangers who were not strangers at all.
She picked up her satchel. She set it on her lap. She opened it. She took out the folder of letters, the folder she had brought with her from the house, the folder she had not yet shown him. She looked at it. She set it on her knee, next to the mug.
She would bring it to him. She would bring it to him the next time he came, and the time after that, and the time after that. She would bring it to him, and she would sit with him while he read it, and she would drink the terrible instant coffee, and she would listen to the wind in the elms, and she would wait.
She finished her tea. She stood up. She gathered her things. She carried the folder and her satchel to the door of the shop, and she opened the door, and the wind came in, and the chimes rang, and she stepped out into the street, and the door closed behind her, and the shop was empty, and the folder was on the stack of phone books, and the mugs were on the table, and the wind moved through the bare branches of the elms outside, and the street was quiet, and the day was almost over, and Rosemary Beckett walked home through the town she had always lived in, carrying a folder she did not yet fully understand, and a poem she had been trying to give away for twenty years, and the faint, persistent sense that the man who had just left her shop had been waiting for her for a very long time, and that she had, perhaps, been waiting for him too.
She walked home. The elms were bare. The street was quiet. The folder was heavy in her satchel, and the poem was light, and the day was almost over, and she did not look back.