Grace quickened her pace toward the townhouse. She was nearly out of breath when she rounded the corner, anxious over what she might find.
Mrs. Weatherford huffed behind her. “I can’t run with Tabby.”
But Grace wasn’t listening as she studied the tidy line of townhouses on their street. Their home was intact, just the same as it’d ever been, save for the tomatoes sprouting from the window boxes rather than the former purple and white petunias.
The sense of dread inside her yawned wider.
Ice chilled the blood in her veins.
The bookshop.
“Go on without me,” Grace said to Mrs. Weatherford.
Before the older woman could ask what she meant, Grace was sprinting toward Hosier Lane with her bed bundle clutched to her chest. The acrid, smoke-filled air burned her throat and stung her eyes, but she didn’t slow as she darted around people returning home from a night hunkered in the tube station.
She had to reassure herself that it was safe, that it had survived the brutal onslaught. After all, Mr. Evans had entrusted her with the shop.
But with each step closer, the band of unease tightened.
When she rounded Hosier Lane, she stopped short, discovering why.
The street smoldered with extinguished fires. The building to the right of the bookshop had been struck in a blast, demolished to piles of broken brick. Primrose Hill Books still stood. But was not intact.
Glass had been blown out of every window, and shredded pages limped in an unseen breeze among the detritus on the pavement. The door was missing, and the contents inside were a scattered mess. Overhead, part of the roof had detached and the stucco near it scorched with flames that luckily had not consumed the structure.
Grace’s heart seemed to shrink inside her chest, sucked into a realm of pure dread. She stood, numb, unable to shake herself from the sight. A gust of wind rustled her skirt and carried with it a flurry of ashes and heat from a nearby fire.
The shop was inoperable.
The source of her strength had been torn inside out.
Grace dragged herself into action, stepping toward the damaged building as the bedroll slipped from her hands. The world around her crackled from nearby fires, and the crunching of glass underfoot mingled with the ragged draw of her breath.
Any hope that Primrose Hill Books might look better up close was dashed as she stopped before the place she had poured her soul into, the culmination of a lifetime of Mr. Evans’s hard work and the community she had built around the world of reading.
Grace struggled to find her breath, gasping around the pain that shattered open inside her, white hot and visceral. A small painted newspaper flower she’d designed for the window display rolled over bits of broken glass and dust, stopping at the toe of her shoe. She bent to pick it up. Its twisted paper stem was cool and hard where she pinched it between her fingers, its pink petals as immaculate and clean as the day she made it.
She had to go inside. To see for herself.
If nothing else, to ensure the precious books within the safe had survived.
She entered the gaping doorway and walked slowly through the mess, careful to not tread upon the fallen books. They would need to be salvaged. If they could be.
In her bewildered state, she wondered how she might sort her books from those belonging to the other bookshops, remembering belatedly she’d stamped their names inside with blue ink. Thank goodness for the organized detail with which she’d handled everything before.
Not that it would help the other shop owners, as the bookshop was now almost as useless as theirs. None of them would have a place to go.
Tears prickled in her eyes at that realization, at her inability to help those who had come to rely on her.
The back room door was missing, and the small table had been mangled into a ball of metal in one corner. The safe was fortunately still lodged within the wall. She wrestled with a cabinet drawer and withdrew a torch. With shaking hands, she unlocked the safe and held her breath.
Mr. Evans’s legacy was in those precious books he saved and collected.
The door groaned open and an exhale whooshed from Grace’s lungs. The books that had once been rescued from the flames of Hitler’s hatred had again survived a near demise. They were safely tucked inside the wall safe, framed on all sides within a shell of thick metal.
She had a mind to draw them out and bring them home with her to Britton Street. But thought better of it, knowing they were best left in their iron box. She was beginning to close the door when a slip of paper caught her eye.
An envelope.
A corner of it jutted from between two books whose German titles she couldn’t read. She plucked it from its location and read her name on its back in Mr. Evans’s slanted writing.