Page 46 of Everything You Hate
“You’re thinking about the journal.”
“I’m multitasking.”
She abandons the shelf entirely and leans against the counter. Her cat-eye glasses slip down her nose. She doesn’t push them back up. “Give it to me.”
“I can’t. It’s?—”
“I’m not going to eat it. I just want to see it.” She holds out both hands, palms up, like she’s asking for a baby. “Please? I run a romance bookstore. I’ve been selling fictional longing for four years. Actual historical longing is like crack to me.”
I hesitate, then unzip my bag and pull out the journal. The leather is soft under my fingers, the spine cracked along a seam that’s been mended with something that looks like fishing line. I hand it over.
Piper takes it like it might dissolve. She doesn’t open it immediately. She holds it, turns it over, runs a thumb along the gold-stamped initials. E.M.
“Gus had this for forty years,” she says. “Forty years, and he just... handed it to you.”
“He said he forgot what was in it.”
“Gus Pemberton has never forgotten anything in his life. He remembers what brand of nail my grandfather bought in 1973.” She opens the journal carefully, pages crackling. “Holy shit. Her handwriting.”
It’s beautiful. Clean, slanted, the kind of penmanship they stopped teaching fifty years ago. No crossings-out. No second tries. She wrote each entry the way someone writes a letter they don’t intend to send.
Piper reads. I watch her face change. The professional curiosity falls away first, replaced by something softer, then something sharper. Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“She walked to the harbor. For eight years. Twice a week.” Piper looks up. “To watch him work. And never spoke to him.”
“Not once.”
“Eight years.”
“Eight years of filling four pages about a man unloading crates, then going home and writing nothing happened today in her actual diary.” I take the journal back, find the harbor entries. They start in 1884, when Evangeline was fifteen. They end in 1892, the night before her wedding. “She knew his schedule better than he did. Knew which boats he worked. Knew when he was sick because he wasn’t there on a Thursday and she wrote about the empty pier for two pages.”
Piper sinks onto the stool behind the counter. “Thomas knew.”
“He couldn’t have. She never?—”
“Of course he knew.” She props her chin on her hand. “A woman shows up at the same pier, same time, twice a week for eight years and does nothing but stand there watching you? He knew. He had to.”
“She says he never looked at her.”
“She says he never looked at her directly. There’s a difference.” Piper’s eyes are lit. This is her territory—the spaces between what people say and what they mean, the geography of longing. “He knew. I’d bet my entire inventory he knew, and he never approached her because what was he supposed to say? Hey, I’ve noticed you’ve been standing here watching me for the better part of a decade, care to explain?”
The bell above the door chimes.
Dean walks in like the door personally offended him. Boots on hardwood, jacket half-zipped, and that look on his face—the one that says he’s been holding something back so long it’s turned corrosive. He finds me across the store and goes straight at it.
“We need to talk.”
Piper straightens. “Hi, Dean. Welcome to my store. We have books.”
He ignores her. “Now. Outside.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“It’ll keep.”
The store has two other customers. A woman in the romance section pretending very hard not to eavesdrop, and an older man by the window reading a newspaper with the headlines folded inward. Both of them have gone still.
I set the journal down and cross my arms. “Whatever it is, you can say it here.”
