Page 3 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

CHLOE

Our heist went off without a hitch.

Distracting Gunderson was easy enough for Pepper to do, since he was the sort of man who took twenty minutes to read off his grocery list. A great stickler for detail, our Gunderson, which made him a great librarian but not so great whenever we sat down for a staff meeting. He once put together an entire PowerPoint presentation on alphabetizing when using hyphens and apostrophes—all good and important stuff in the world of books, don’t get me wrong, but nothing that couldn’t have been shared in a quick two-sentence email.

Anyway, Pepper asked him a question about the new metadata requirements for our online catalog system, and he was off on one of his monotone tangents for the next half hour. As I walked out the back with my stolen books, Gunderson did no more than give me a quick glance before returning to his beloved keywords and ISBN-13s.

Poor Pepper got the short end of that stick, for sure. I jimmied open the passenger door to the bookmobile, slid the Harlequins underneath the seat, and tossedTropic of Cancerinto the glove compartment of my huge rusted station wagon until it was time to head home for the day.

Which, blissfully, was now. Eight hours of clearing out books wore on a body a lot more than you’d think, even when that body was only twenty-four years old. Unfortunately, as soon as I stepped up to my front door, half-painted in seafoam green and half-rusted where the paint had run out, it swung open with a bang.

“Chloe,finally!” cried the oldest of my siblings as she came barreling up.

Even though Trixie was an absolute knockout of a fifteen-year-old who defied all the rules of adolescence with her clear skin, naturally straight teeth, and a level of self-confidence usually reserved for mediocre men forty years her senior, she always seemed to be barreling. She also flounced, traipsed, somersaulted, and crashed. Unless it was an active verb in its most active tense, she wanted no part of it.

“You won’t believe what happened today,” she said, beaming. That was another thing she did—she beamed. She was the only person I’d ever met whose sunny disposition went so deep that it was a physical part of her. “Guess which second alternate just landed herself a starting position on the debate team?”

“Penny Harlow?” I guessed. Even though I already knew the answer, I couldn’t resist playing the game. As we spoke, I stepped past our tiny entry into the living room, doing my best to ignore the piles of shoes and backpacks and the other inevitable detritus of the young.

“Ugh. Obviously not. Penny can’t even raise her hand in class without breaking out in hives.”

“Jacob Jarabecki?”

“Chloe, Jake can’t string together a full sentence unless it’s about football—and even then, he only makes sense half the time.” My sister’s lower lip came down in a pout. “Are youtryingto be mean?”

“A little bit, yeah,” I confessed, but not before swooping in to press a kiss on her cheek. She smelled, as she always did, of fresh grass clippings and her general air of joie de vivre. Don’t ask me what joie de vivre smells like, because I couldn’t tell you. All you need to know is that it’s chic andeffortless, and if anyone finds a way to bottle it up and sell it, they’ll make a fortune. “That’s fantastic news, Trixie. You deserve it.”

She hooked her arms around my neck before I could let go. “I don’t—not really. I only got a spot because Sonya and Sasha’s mom made them drop out. She says the travel expenses are too high, and that there’s no need to pay good money for them to argue in public when they do it at home for free all the time.” She pulled back a little and scanned my face. “That’s okay, right? We can afford it? The team only travels every other week, and I can participate in the fun runs and stuff to help with the costs.”

I thought about the stolen book sitting in my glove box and groaned inwardly. So much for my new dishwasher.

“Sure thing, Trix,” I said. “Don’t sweat it.”

I kept the smile on my face until I felt sure she wouldn’t see anything but my pride in her. Help arrived in the shape of my two other siblings, who came dashing into the living room a few seconds later. To be more precise, Theo dashed. Noodle came out with slumped shoulders and a heavy tread I recognized well.

“Is Trixie telling you about her stupid debate team?” Theo asked. At eleven, he was the baby of the family, but he was bidding fair to outgrow every last one of us. It was almost impossible to keep any meat on his bones, so he was all gangling limbs and awkward angles. He ate a whole box of cereal (off-brand Cheerios) by himself every morning, and finished his day with a second box (off-brand Cinnamon Toast Crunch) for dessert. And that didn’t even touch the mass quantities of calories required to sustain him the rest of the time.

“Ugh,” he muttered. “No one cares about debate. Who wants to talk about politics in front of a bunch of grown-ups?”

“Lots of people,” I said. “Especially the kind who plan toworkin politics with a bunch of grown-ups one day.”

He waved me off as only an eleven-year-old blithely unconcerned with anything but the contents of his own stomach could do.

“Whatever. I forgot to tell you—my science project is due tomorrow. Do we have any nitrous oxide?”

I blinked at him, his head level with mine. “Of course we don’t have nitrous oxide. Isn’t that laughing gas?”

“Fine.” His lower lip shot out, but as was the case with Trixie, his optimism ran deep. “What about ammonium nitrate? That’s not hard to get, is it?”

“Yes, it’s hard to get. They use it to make explosives. What on earth are they teaching you at that school?”

I felt a tug on the bottom of my shirt before I could ask any follow-up questions, most of which revolved around the likelihood of our house still standing by dinnertime. Theo was a bright kid, and I was inordinately proud of him for landing a coveted spot at a local charter school, but I was getting tired of putting locks on every cabinet containing anything even remotely flammable.

I glanced down to find Noodle’s fingers twisting my T-shirt between anxious fingers.

“It happened again,” he said in the simple, quiet way he had—wholly unlike our siblings, but equally disastrous in the end. “With the Frisbee. We were working on fetch.”

I bit back a groan. This was the part I’d been dreading the most. “I thought we decided you’d only work on training at the park from here on out.”