Page 33 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“Nineteen days,” he said without losing a single crinkle. “That’s how long I get my hands on each trainee. Nineteen days of grueling, labor-intensive work. Nineteen cold dark nights. Nineteen sunrises and sunsets.”

I nodded along, finding myself mesmerized by the way the words were taking shape on his lips.

“You’d be surprised what happens to people after a few days living under those kinds of conditions,” he continued. “It’s like plugging into a different reality—one where the bullshit just falls away. You eat and you struggle. You make it through each moment, hoping it won’t be your last. And when you finally lie down for the night, you turn to the person next to you and say what’s in your heart. You don’t have the energy for anything else.”

I didn’t say anything for the simple reason that Iwasn’tsurprised. Maybe my daily struggle wasn’t a life-and-death one, but it was close. Juggling the lives of three children, each one of them headstrong and brilliant, took every scrap of energy I had. I made it through each moment, hoping I wasn’t making their lives worse, and when I finally lay down for the night, I turned to…what, exactly? An empty bed? A flattened pillow? A realization that with everything my heart longed to say, there wasn’t a sole living person who wanted to hear it?

“I know you think I come on a little strong, but it’s the nature of the beast,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “I forgot how to pretend a long time ago. When you’ve heard as many life stories as I have—the mistakes and the regrets, the missed connections and wasted opportunities—you learn to just go for it. I like you, and I like your family. I’m interested in seeing more of both. I don’t see any reason to pretend otherwise.”

If I’d been a frank, ruggedly handsome mountain man with the best smile in the world, I might have been able to reply in kind. As an underpaid not-quite-a-librarian college dropout who was holding her family together using nothing but carefully rotating credit card balances and sheer force of will, I changed the subject.

“You must be an only child,” I said.

He looked at me through quizzically teasing eyes. “What makes you say that?”

“If you had siblings, then you wouldn’t spend an evening with mineand want to repeat the experience. The only charm they have is that of novelty.”

“Don’t forget the charm of an older sister who’s determined not to make this easy on me,” he pointed out. He heaved a playful sigh. “But you’re right. I’m the only child of two only children. Life doesn’t get much bleaker than that.”

At that, I felt a flash of triumph—and a stab of something else, something like pity. My siblings were a trial and a menace, but they were everything to me. I couldn’t imagine a world without Trixie’s determination to cut a swath straight through it, Theo’s blithe disregard for convention, or Noodle’s gentle acceptance of it. I couldn’t imagine a life where I woke up alone in that house without their noise and their joy to get me up out of bed.

Sometimes, I wondered if my mom felt that, too—the people she’d left behind, the children she’d been unwilling to see as anything but a burden—or if all she felt was free.

“That sounds lonely,” I said.

“It was. It is.”

A shout of laughter came from the direction of the arcade games. We both glanced over to find Theo tipping a pinball machine so far on its side that it was in danger of falling on top of him.

I sighed. “You can borrow mine whenever you want them. Free of charge.”

“As long as you come with them, I’m in,” he said. I was so flustered by this that I failed to notice when he shifted position. His hand brushed lightly against my shoulder, pushing aside a strand of my hair. “Does this mean you aren’t going to tell me the secret?”

“The secret?” I echoed, distracted by that hand and how close it was to the exposed skin of my neck. “Oh. Yeah. That.”

“You made it sound pretty juicy, like you know where the copy ofThe Haunting of Hill Housemight be.”

I was so grateful to have something—anything—else to focus on that I ended up blurting out more than I intended. “It’s our next-door neighbor, Jasper. Jasper Holmes. He’s this horrible, grouchy old man who steals all our Frisbees and soccer balls and gets mad if we accidentally step on one of his roses.”

“He steals Frisbees? The nerve.”

“You laugh, but he’s been my personal white whale for longer than I can remember. Only get this—just last week, I finally bagged him.”

Zach put a hand over his chest and gave a mock swoon. “Moby Dickreferences? Be still, my beating heart.”

I nudged him with my hip until my thigh pressed up against his. And then, inexplicably, I left it there.

“This is serious,” I said. “It all started when I found a ratty old copy ofTropic of Cancerdown in the library basement. It’s this dirty book that—”

“There’s no need to explainTropic of Cancerto me,” he interrupted, his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I spend half my life alone on a mountain, remember? If there’s even one mention of a marital bed inside a piece of literature, I’ve read it, placed it under my pillow, and let it carry me off to dreamland.”

A burst of heat rose to the surface of my skin. “No decent human being admits to reading that book, let alone enjoying it.”

“Yet here we are, discussing it like two hot-blooded, consenting adults.” He took pity on my flaming cheeks and pulled his leg away from mine. Only when the press of his thigh was gone could I breathe normally again. “Okay, you found a copy ofTropic of Cancer. So what?Fifty Shades of Greyis way more descriptive, and people read that at their kids’ piano recitals. In this day and age, it’s not a big deal.”

I bit down on the urge to ask him if he’d read the entirety of the Fifty Shades series up there among his trees and focused on what really mattered: the romance of Catherine and Jasper Holmes.

“There were notes inside it,” I explained as I filled him in on the rough details. “Notes written by the same two people who scribbled inside your Hemingway.” In the short amount of time we had, and with the booming clatter of bowling pins falling down around us, I couldn’t go into as much detail as I wanted, but Zach was quick to catch on—about Jasper’s blank check and greedy snatch at the book, about his strange kindness in offering to keep an eye on Noodle, at the hint dropped by Gunderson that something catastrophic happened in Jasper’s past. All of it seemed to indicate that the next page of my personal mystery was behind his closed doors.