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“Sloane.” His voice changes, drops into the flat register he keeps for the things he flew across an ocean to say in person and couldn't, so he's saying them on a Wednesday instead. “It came down Tuesday. The thing with Dad.”

I stop pricing. My hand stays on the spine of the O'Neill like it's the only thing holding the shelf up. “And?”

“Guilty. Aggravated assault.” A breath on his end, half eleven at night and an ocean away. “Renata's cheekbone and broken arm made it serious bodily injury, so it went felony, and with the DUI riding along on the same night the judge wasn't feeling generous. Two to five, state. He's parole-eligible at the two if he keeps his nose clean inside, which—” The dry thing he does, the one piece of him we both inherited and neither of us asked for. “Well. You've met him.”

Two to five years. I do the thing I'm good at, which is hold a piece of news at arm's length and turn it over a few times before I let it near me, and the part I won't tell Danny is that when I finally let it near me, it doesn't land. I keep waiting for the floor of it. I've been waiting for the floor of my father my whole life, and it turns out the floor is a sentence read out in a county courthouse two hundred miles away while I priced a dead man's books, and it arrives the way Yale arrived this morning — which is to say it doesn't, which is to say something in me has gone quiet about all of it except the one thing I walked away from twelve days ago.

“You okay?” Danny asks, because he's the only one with the clearance to.

“I'm okay.” Two words. True, even, which is the worst part of it.

We talk about nothing for nine more minutes. I don’t say I lost Yale today. I don’t say I left someone two weeks ago and I can’t stand in a kitchen. I say the food’s better than they tell me, and he laughs, and we hang up, and the shop is very loud with quiet after.

A man comes in at a quarter to close looking for something for his wife. He doesn’t know what she reads; he only knows that she reads, which he says like an apology. I walk him to fiction and put the new Emily Henry in his hands, because the new Emily Henry is what you give a man who doesn’t know what his wife reads but loves her enough to ask a stranger in a bookshop at closing. He’s grateful in the helpless way of a man who married up. I ring him out and wish him a good holiday and mean it, and the wanting-it-for-him — the small domestic version, a man and a book and a wife who’ll be glad — goes through me like cold water and is gone before I decide what to do with my face.

Here’s the thing that surfaces around nine, pencil in my hand, a 1962 Long Day’s Journey I’m trying not to underprice: I lost Yale today and it feels like losing a coat I never liked. I lost Beau twelve days ago and I still can’t be in a room with a door without my whole body pointing at it.

That’s the data. I don’t want the data. I price the O’Neill and put it back in the box with the dead man’s books, because the shop closes at six for everyone but me, and I am not finished not feeling things yet.

Evan is leaning on the railing outside the library the next night when I come out at nine, and the thing about Evan is that he is always leaning on something, like furniture is the only thing keeping him upright, like he learned his whole body off a beer commercial.

“There she is.” He pushes off the rail. He’s bigger than the rail. He’s bigger than most things, and he’s spent eight months making sure I know it without ever once having to say it. “Heard about you and the hockey guy.”

“Did you?” I keep walking. He falls in beside me, which is its own message, and the cold does the thing it’s done in my chest since I was nineteen and learned what his hand felt like when the charm ran out.

“Don’t be like that. I’m being nice.” Warm, even, which is the worst register he owns. “I came to check on you. Old times.”

“You can stop.”

“A guy like Sorensen.” He whistles low, appraising a car. “First-round money, Greenwich, the whole family-photo thing. And he picks up the theater girl in the thrift-store coat with no people.” He says it gently, because he figured out a long time ago that gentle cuts deeper on me than loud ever did. “Come on. Guys like that don’t keep girls like you. They slum it a semester, they get the story for the reunion, they trade up by Christmas. You had to know the shape of it walking in.”

I stop, because the leaving-fast thing is right there and he knows that one too. I plant my feet on the path and turn and look at him the way you look at a man you’ve already survived, which is a look he hates, because it files him under past.

“You think he made you somebody.” Quiet now, matching me, because Evan can do quiet when quiet is winning. “He didn’t. You’re exactly what you were when I had you. He just hadn’t found the floor of you yet.”

“You’d know about floors.” I hold his eyes and keep my voice low, because low is the only weapon that doesn’t cut my own hand. “You put enough people on them.”

His jaw works.

“You waited outside a library on a Tuesday in December,” I add, “for a girl with no people. That’s not nothing, Evan. That’s a hobby.” Taking the warm off him is the only win on the table, so I take it, and I go.

“It won’t last,” he calls after me, louder now, because loud is what’s left when you’ve lost the other thing. “You’ll see. Girls like you always run it into the ground.”

He’s right that it won’t last. He’s wrong about every reason he’s got for thinking so. But the hook’s already in — girls like you — and I carry it the eleven blocks home, because that’s what I do with things. I carry them without setting them down, so I never have to find out, out loud, how much they weigh.

Bella comes into the shop two days later, the last Saturday before break, when half of Haven is buying paperbacks for people they don’t know how to talk to.

I know who she is the way you know the understudy who wanted your part — Beau’s, before me, the one who used to post herself in the good seats at Corbin in a jersey with his number and her own last name stitched underneath. I get my face ready for the Evan version of this.

She doesn’t reach for it. She picks a Didion off the table, turns it over, sets it back down. “You work here.”

“I do.”

“Huh.” She looks around the shop like she’s pricing it, then back at me, and there is nothing in her face I can use. “I almost didn’t come in. Then I figured, no, I want to see it. The girl.” A small, tired breath that lands nowhere near an insult. “You’re not what I had in my head.”

“People rarely are.” I keep the pencil moving in the Didion’s flyleaf so my hands have a job. “Was there a book, or…”

“He never looked at me like that.” She says it flat, a fact she’s done being surprised by. “Two years, on and off. I’d have killed for the way he looked at you in the bar back in October. The whole room could see it. I saw it from the door, and I wasn’t even looking.”