“At this point I’d hardly be surprised to find out you’re the mayor of North Bear Shores.”

She gave a rattling laugh. “Oh, no, can’t say that I am! Though maybe I could get some shit done around here, if they’d have me! This town is a nice little pocket of progressivism here in the Mitten, but the people with the purse strings are still a bunch of pearl-clutching golf bags.”

I fought a smile. It sounded so much like something Dad would’ve said. The ache seared through me, fire-poker sharp and hot.

“Anyway, don’t mind me and my O-PIN-YUNS,” she enunciated, lifting her thick ash-blonde brows. “I’m just a lowly entrepreneur. What can I do you for, sugar?”

“I just wanted to introduce myself,” I admitted. “I’m a writer, actually, with Sandy Lowe Books, and I’m here for the summer, so I figured I’d say hi, sign stock if you have any.”

“Ohhh, another writer in town!” she cried. “How exciting! You know, North Bear brings in a lot of artist types. It’s our way of life, I think. And the college. All sorts of freethinkers over there. A beautiful little community. You’re going to love it here …” The way her words dropped off suggested she was waiting for me to insert my own name at the end of her sentence.

“January,” I chimed in. “Andrews.”

“Pete,” she said, shaking my hand with the vigor of a green beret who’s just said, Put ’er there, son!

“Pete?” I said. “Of Pete’s Coffee fame?”

“The very same. Legal name’s Posy. What kind of a name is that?” She pantomimed gagging. “Seriously, do I look like a Posy to you? Does anyone look like a Posy?”

I shook my head. “Maybe, like, a baby wearing a polyester flower costume?”

“Soon as I could talk, I set that one straight. Anyway, January Andrews.” Pete stepped up to the computer and plugged my name into the keyboard. “Let’s see if we’ve got your book.”

I never corrected people when they said singular “book” rather than plural “books,” but sometimes the assumption dug under my skin. It made me feel like people thought my career was a fluke. Like I’d sneezed and a romance novel came out.

And then there were the people who acted like we were in on some secret joke together when, after a conversation about Art or Politics, they found out I wrote upbeat women’s fiction: Whatever pays the bills, right? they’d say, practically begging me to confirm I didn’t want to write books about women or love.

“Looks like we don’t have any in stock,” Pete said, looking up from the screen. “But I tell ya what, you’d better believe I’m ordering them in.”

“That’d be great!” I said. “Maybe we could host a workshop later this summer.”

Pete gasped and clutched my arm. “Idea, January Andrews! You should come to our book club. We’d love to have ya. Great way to get involved in the community. It’s Mondays. Can you do Monday? Tomorrow?”

In my head, Anya said, You know what made The Girl on the Train happen? Book clubs.

That was a stretch. But I liked Pete. “Mondays work.”

“Fantastic. I’ll send you my address. Seven PM, lots of booze, always a hoot.” She pulled a business card from the desk and passed it across the counter. “You do email, don’t you?”

“Almost constantly.”

Pete’s smile widened. “Well, you just shoot me a message and we’ll make sure you’re all set for tomorrow.”

I promised her I would and turned to go, nearly colliding with the display table. I watched the pyramid of books tremble, and as I stood there, waiting to see if they’d fall, I realized the entire thing was made out of the same book, each marked with an AUTOGRAPHED sticker.

An uncanny tingle climbed my spine.

There, on the abstract black-and-white cover, in square red letters, beneath The Revelatories, was his name. It was all coming together in my mind, a domino trail of realizations. I didn’t mean to say it aloud, but I might have.

Because the bells over the bookshop door tinkled, and when I looked up, there he was. Olive skin. Cheekbones that could cut you. Crooked mouth and a husky voice I’d never forget. Messy, dark hair I could immediately picture haloed in fluorescent light.

Augustus Everett. Gus, as I’d known him back in college.

“Everett!” as Pete was calling affectionately from behind the desk.

My neighbor, the Grump.

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf.

4

The Mouth

THE WORST PART of being college rivals with Gus Everett? Probably the fact that I wasn’t sure he knew we were. He was three years older, a high school dropout who’d gotten his GED after spending a few years working as a literal gravedigger. I knew all of this because every story he turned in our first semester was part of a collection centering on the cemetery where he’d worked.

The rest of us in the creative writing program were pulling fodder from our asses (and childhoods: soccer games won in the last instant, fights with parents, road trips with friends), and Gus Everett was writing about the eight kinds of mourning widows, analyzing the most common epitaphs, the funniest, the ones that subtly betrayed a strained relationship between the deceased and the person footing the headstone’s bill.

Like me, Gus was at U of M on a slew of scholarships, but it was unclear how he’d gotten them, since he played no sports and hadn’t technically graduated from high school. The only explanation was that he was atrociously good at what he did.

To top things off, Gus Everett was stupidly, infuriatingly attractive. And not the universal kind of handsome that almost dulls itself with objectivity. It was more of a magnetism he emanated. Sure, he was just barely on the tall side of average, with the lean muscle of someone who never stopped moving around but also never intentionally exercised—a lazy kind of fit that came from genetics and restlessness rather than good habits—but it was more than that.

It was the way he talked and moved, how he looked at things. Not, like, how he saw the world. Literally how he looked at things, his eyes seeming to darken and grow whenever he focused, his eyebrows furrowing over his dented nose.

Not to mention his crooked mouth, which should’ve been outlawed.

Before she dropped out of U and M to become an au pair (a pursuit soon abandoned), Shadi would ask me nightly at dinner for updates on Sexy, Evil Gus, sometimes abbreviated as SEG. I was minorly besotted with him and his prose.

Until we finally spoke for the first time in class. I was passing out my latest short story for critique, and when I handed it to him, he looked me dead in the eyes—his head tilted curiously—and said, “Let me guess: Everyone lives happily ever after. Again.”

I wasn’t writing romance yet—I didn’t even realize how much I loved reading romance until Mom’s second diagnosis two years later, when I needed a good distraction—but I was definitely writing romantically, about a good world, where things happened for a reason, where love and human connection were all that really mattered.

And Gus Everett had looked at me with those eyes, deepening and darkening like they were sucking every bit of information about me into his skull, and he’d determined that I was a balloon in need of popping.