A Winter in New York
Josie Silver
Valentine’s Day
…
LOGAN’S BOOKSTORE, LOWER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK
YOU KNOW WHEN A HIGH-OCTANE scene in a movie goes slo-mo for dramatic effect, and you hold your breath and ask yourself will the person on the screen leap the burning chasm between high-rise buildings or catch the priceless vase before it shatters into a hundred pieces? I feel like someone just pressed the slo-mo button on my life as I reach out to grab the final copy of the book I’ve been waiting on for the last year straight, and someone beside me makes the exact same move at the exact same time. I see their coat sleeve stretch out beside mine and I make an unceremonious lunge, a relay racer throwing out her arm for the baton because nothing but a win will do. My fingertips graze the cover, actual contact, but no-no-no, their—his arm is bloody longer and at the last moment I feel the book slide away from me into his hand.
“But I touched it.” I can’t stop the words from rasping out of my mouth as I panic-clutch imaginary pearls around my neck. That book was my Valentine gift to myself, and given everything I’ve been through, I think I deserve it.
His face is a mask of faux innocence when he turns to me.
“But I was here first,” I mumble, like a crestfallen child who just got shoved off the last seat in a game of musical chairs.
He flips the book over to read the back. “I didn’t see you, sorry.”
He returns his attention to the novel, a clear signal that our interaction is over, and I look around for back-up, sure that someone must have witnessed the bookshop-crime that just happened here. You expect this kind of fight for the last glass of fizz at a wedding or the only remaining biscuit at the Monday morning meeting, but we’re book people, for God’s sake. We don’t behave that way. Which must mean this guy isn’t a book person, so maybe there’s still a way I can win here.
“Excuse me.” I clear my throat as if I’m about to make a loudspeaker announcement.
He looks my way again, dark eyes widening in question. I can’t quite read his expression, but I think he might be trying to smother a victory smile and I really dislike him for it. Definitely not a book person.
“You probably don’t want that one.” I nod toward my—I mean, the book. “It’s the third in a trilogy, it won’t make any sense without having read the other two first.” I cast a desperate eye over the bestseller shelf and reach for the latest Lee Child. “Try this instead. Everyone loves Jack Reacher. It’s like the movie, you know, the one where Tom Cruise somehow manages to pull off being Reacher even though he’s at least a foot too short for the role? Except this is better, obviously, because it’s the book.” I’m gabbling like a total idiot, and he looks from the book in his hand to the one in mine.
“Isn’t that always the case, though?” He sighs. “The book being better than the movie, I mean?”
I slam my hand over my heart, blindsided by this undeniable truth. “Isn’t it just?” I nod hard. “Every single time. I refuse to even watch The Time Traveler’s Wife, you know, just in case.”
He half smiles, polite, and I inch the Lee Child out toward him, a silent encouragement.
“So, you’d recommend I pick up the Jack Reacher series more than twenty books in, but not read book three of this series?”
“Yes, but these are all stand-alone stories.” I tap the Lee Child and try to keep the annoyance from my voice. “You don’t have to have read the others first to enjoy this one.”
“But this one…？” He turns the book over in his hands, cover side up.
An almost painful sigh rattles up my throat. I’ve studied that cover so many times online, looking for clues as to how the final story unfolds. The cover artists are fiendishly clever at hiding Easter eggs within the intricate illustrations—it’s all part of the book’s appeal.
“Massively complicated,” I say. “One big sprawling story over three installments, not a hope of picking it up. It’d basically be like reading French.”
“French, huh?” he says.
I get the sudden suspicion he’s about to break into fluent French. “Or Dutch or Chinese or, I don’t know, Swahili. Impossible, basically.”
“Good cover, though.” He looks closely. “Is that a rabbit?”
I can’t help myself, I peer at it too. Damn it, he’s right. I try not to think about what that might mean for the story.
“This one won’t have rabbits.” I flick the pages of the Lee Child like a magician fanning a deck of cards. “It’ll be full of car chases and stakeouts and pithy one-liners.” I give it the big sell even though I’ve never actually read a Jack Reacher to know what happens in them.
“Lapin,” he says.
I tip my head to one side.
“French for rabbit,” he says.
“Do you know it in Swahili too?”
“Wouldn’t it be hilarious if I did?” he says. “But sadly no. What I do know, though, is that this rabbit will be more than just a rabbit.” He taps the book. “It might suggest that Steph is going to discover a burrow of escape tunnels beneath the castle, or maybe it’s more subtle, that she needs to leap into the unknown to save Estelina?”
My shoulders sag inside my winter coat as realization dawns. He’s not putting that book down anytime soon. His victory expression is straight out of the David Rose playbook, smile tightly compressed as he nods, basking in his moment of glory. I offer a silent apology to Lee Child as I slide his book back onto the shelf. I think he can take the hit.
“You could always try the Jack Reacher yourself,” he says. “I hear it’s full of pithy one-liners.”
I wish more than anything for a pithy one-liner of my own at that moment, but what erupts from me is far from concise.
“You know what? Have the book. Have. The. Damn. Book. It’s fine. It’s my life all over, in fact.”
I sense him take a small step back as he passes his hand over his jaw, watching me. The shop lighting catches the gold of his wedding ring, incensing me further for reasons that are nothing to do with this stranger in a bookstore, but he gets it both barrels regardless.
“You take that book, which you probably won’t even have time to open tonight because you’ll be taking your wife out for a fancy dinner at the top of the Empire State Building or lying on a checked blanket in the back of a pickup truck looking for shooting stars or, I don’t know, some other equally trite Valentine’s shite.”
My voice just hit unpleasantly shrill, and his expression stiffens as his eyes skim my mother’s distinctive heart-shaped signet ring on my wedding finger.
“Well, I sure hope your husband knows better than to expect any trite shite from you tonight.”
My Britishisms sound ridiculous in his New York accent, and I feel his judgment like a sharp slap.
“He’s dead, if you must know, and I had just one crappy plan for tonight, which was to lie on my lumpy rental couch and read that book, and now, thanks to you and your bloody long arms, I can’t even do that.”
He looks mortified, understandably, apologizing in broken sentences as he pushes the book into the space toward me, but I’ve hiked too far up my moral-high-ground mountain to be able to reach down and take it. The air up here is so thin it hurts to breathe, so I huff one last furious time and stomp out of the store, hacking strings of paper love hearts out of my path as I go.