“You want it?” Omar’s standard response, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off Nora.
And I see why. She glows, like her face is lit up from inside. She stands looking at him for a while, letting him look back, letting him stand close, their eyes holding, but neither of them saying anything more. Then she points at a place on the other side of the bar with her chin, and he ducks back under and doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes—never mind every single one is on him—and slumps onto the stool she picked for him, battered, like he’s swapped the weight of one world for another, but unbeaten as yet.
She brings him a beer and a bowl of pretzels, a meager offering maybe but an offering nonetheless.
“Thank you, Omar.”
“Anytime, Nora.”
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“Well,” he hedges, “at least this time.”
One
“So!” Petra says, eyes shining, an unmeasurably small amount of time after River gives me the folder with the emails and leaves the cafeteria. “Read them!”
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean ‘Not yet’？！” Shrieking.
“You sound like Monday,” I inform her.
“I DO NOT SOUND LIKE MONDAY!” she disagrees.
“I have to wait for her.”
“Who?”
“Monday.”
“Why?”
“And Mirabel.”
“Who drove you all the way to and from Greenborough?”
“We studied on the way,” I say.
“Compendiously,” she says.
“They’re my sisters.”
“So am I.”
“Tomorrow,” I promise, because she’s right about that part. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything.”
* * *
Pooh also opens with “So! Read them!”
“I’m waiting for my sisters.”
“What about me?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“What if I’m dead tomorrow?”
“Then you won’t care anymore.”
“Nothing exciting ever happens in Bourne.”
I nod. She’s not wrong.
“And when it does, it’s because everyone’s being poisoned,” she allows, “which is almost worse.”
I nod some more.
“Why did you even come by if you weren’t going to let me see?”
“To give you incentive not to die before tomorrow,” I tell her.
* * *
On the way up my own driveway, I run into Apple Templeton. She’s on her way out of my front door. She looks surprised to see me, but not half as surprised as I am to see her—I live here, after all—and I worry that if she looked at me closely she would see at once that her son picked me, picked us, that he betrayed her family to help mine, that I hold in my hands a thing he gave me which might break open the lawsuit, bring Belsum to its knees, and change everything forever. But as soon as her eyes meet mine, she looks away.
Inside, I find Monday reorganizing the periodical section, which lives under the bathroom sink. It’s mostly old magazines from the eighties, many missing covers, most missing pages, all water damaged and molding. Usually she arranges them by topic. Sometimes by color. Today, though, she seems to be going for alphabetical by the first name of the issue’s first contributor.
“So things didn’t go well with Apple?”
“We played Truth or Dare and a Lie.”
Well, one of them did probably. “Why was she here?”
“She wants River to leave Bourne.”
“Leave?” My chest feels strange.
“She does not want him settling in. She does not want him to forget his plan to go.”
“Was she here to see me?” I knew it from her face in the driveway.
“Why would she be here to see you?”
Because she knows he’s helping us, knows what he told me at the dam, knows what he delivered in the cafeteria. She knows we’ve spent time together and everything’s changing, and she wants it to stop.
“I don’t know,” I lie.
“She came to borrow books about how to get your son into college when his grandfather is rich but evil and his parents steal other people’s libraries.”
Oh. Strange as this sounds, it actually makes more sense than what I was thinking （though even for Monday, this would be a hard title to find）。
“He gave us something.” I show her my folder.
“What is it?”
“An email thread.”
“What does it say?”