Page 25

He trains all his focus on me. “More love, sometimes.”

I feel that one somewhere low and inconvenient.

Slipping the book into his basket, he asks, “How about you? Collect anything?”

My smile falters. “Not anymore.” Gage doesn’t ask why. Annoyingly, that makes me answer. “I used to collect porcelain dolls.” His eyebrows rise. I point at him. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

He leans closer, grinning. “My face is delighted.”

I gesture toward the glass case of dolls behind us. A dozen painted faces stare back beneath lace bonnets and curls gone fuzzy with age. One wears a faded blue dress with tiny pearl buttons. Another has hairline cracks feathering through one porcelain cheek. “They’re beautiful.”

“They’re haunted.”

“They are not haunted,” I protest, studying the little painted mouths, the miniature shoes, all those layers of lace someone once took the time to sew. “I liked how they weren’t perfect. Cracked glaze. Missing ribbons. Dresses somebody worked hard to repair. They’d already belonged to people before me.”

Gage comes up beside me, close enough for his shoulder to brush mine. Heat coils low in my belly. “So you collected creepy little glass women with complicated histories.”

“That sounds way less judgy than ‘they’re haunted.’”

“I’m growing.”

“Barely.”

“Jules, every porcelain doll is haunted. It’s simply science.”

I laugh loudly enough, a woman down the aisle glances over. “I had fourteen.”

“Fourteen ghosts.”

“Dolls,” I correct, folding my arms.

“Victorian vessels of unrest.”

I shove past him, bumping my shoulder into his arm. “Smart-ass.”

His laugh follows me toward a bin of rolled maps. “Do you still have them?”

“Two. From my grandmother.” The humor slips away. “We sold the rest when we moved.”

Gage doesn’t ask who we are.

Dad disappeared shortly before I turned eighteen, not long before our family fell apart. By the time the police decided Grandma and Grandpa’s deaths might not have been the tragedies everyone believed, he was already gone. I’ve been searching ever since.

Instead, I tap a map. “I collect these now. They’re cheap. Usually.”

His forearm settles beside mine. “What do you do with them?”

“Sometimes I circle somewhere, then check it out when I get home. Pictures. Restaurants. Weird local history.” The confession sounds much sadder out loud. I stay fixed on the map. “I could imagine what it would be like to go somewhere.”

Gage stays quiet for a beat. Thankfully, he doesn’t pity me. “Where would you go first?”

Anywhere but here. I dig until I find another map and unroll it. Scotland. “Here. Somewhere ridiculously green. Cliffs. Fog. Tiny village. Ruined castle. High probability of local ghosts.”

“But not in dolls.”