Page 62 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

“Hold on tight, Aloysius. We’re taking this next part at full speed.”

Jasper braced one hand on the trunk of a ponderosa pine and breathed heavily as young, annoyingly fit Zach zoomed down the path with Noodle slung over his back like a knapsack. The two of them jostled and bounced all the way down, heedless of broken bones and plaster casts and all the other hazards that faced them. Jasper’s whole body ached just to watch them—and, considering the groan Gummy Bear heaved by his side, he was sure the dog felt the same way.

They weren’t kidding when they said that youth was wasted on the young. What Jasper wouldn’t give to have the strong back and legs of his lumberjack days, when lifting a woman was as easy as—

“You coming, old man, or what?” called Zach from the clearing at the bottom of the path. He wasn’t the least bit winded from carrying the hundred-pound boy on his back for over a mile, a grin splitting his good-natured features.

“Hold your horses,” Jasper grumbled as he pushed off the tree. He and Gummy Bear made their way down to join them, their bones cracking with each step. He’d debated with himself for a full ten minutes before finally giving in and calling the wilderness school to request Zach’s help with this little adventure. He didn’twantthe young man’s company, but heneededit. These days, the two things were becoming damnably intertwined.

“There’s no need to be so heroic,” Jasper grumbled as he almost stumbled over a rock. “Chloe isn’t here to watch you show off.”

Zach waggled his eyebrows. He did that good-naturedly, too, as if he was incapable of doing anything without that blasted smile. “Yeah, but Aloysius here can go home and tell her all about it, which is just as good. Why else do you think I agreed to take the day off to be a pack animal?”

Noodle smiled shyly over the top of Zach’s knit cap. He also smoothed the waters with a bland disinterest in any and all things related to his sister’s burgeoning romance. “This is the most fun I’ve had on a field trip before,” he said.

Zach laughed. “That’s because I’m the one doing all the hard work. How much further until we get there?”

“Tired already?” Jasper countered, but without much rancor. Mostly because he was plenty tired himself. “Don’t worry. It’s just through that clearing. The key’s hidden under a mat, but I doubt you’ll need it. The raccoons have been making themselves free with the place for years.”

“Everyone’s gotta live somewhere,” Zach said by way of answer as he turned and trotted the rest of the way to the cabin.

Jasper hadn’t been here in years—probably close to a dozen of them, if he was keeping track—so he wasn’t sure what to expect as he stepped through the aforementioned clearing and up to the one-room log structure that had once housed so many of his hopes and dreams. In his memory, the cabin always seemed to exist in a dappled half sunlight, like an underwater cavern untouched by time or tide.

Like so many parts of his memory, however, the reality was much less exciting. The cabin, once charmingly rustic, was now in danger of falling over. The stacked log walls leaned perilously to one side, the door sunk so low that he had to take an actual step down to make it inside.

And the interior, well, the less said about that the better. If the raccoons had been making themselves free with the place, it had been almost entirely to use the structure as a urinal and nothing else.

“This. Is. Awesome,” Noodle breathed as Zach carefully lowered him to the ground.

“It sure is,” Zach said, and with an absence of irony that put Jasper on his guard. “This isyourplace?”

“It technically belongs to the Neilson Logging Corporation, but yeah. It’s been abandoned for as long as I’ve lived in Colville.” He closed one eye and added, “Which is well over sixty years, so don’t push me.”

Zach grinned. “I hadn’t planned on it, sir.” He started moving around the cabin, his hands tucked carefully behind his back as he peered at the artwork adorning the walls. Most of it was just nature sketches and pressed flowers, but a black-and-white photograph of a young smiling Catherine sat slightly askew above the bed.

“Is this her?” he asked, peering at it. “Catherine? The woman who…died?”

Jasper didn’t care for younger man’s tone, but there didn’t seem any way to avoid it. “That’s her,” he agreed.

Zach released a soundless whistle. “Damn, Jasper. She was a looker.”

Something inside his chest turned over. “I know.”

Fortunately for the state of Jasper’s sad, still-beating heart, Noodle unknowingly intervened once again. “Mr. Holmes, you have a ton of books here. Like,a ton.”

“I know,” he said again. He lowered himself to a wicker chair that looked as though it might hold his weight long enough to get this over with. Gummy Bear, with an affinity that Jasper was starting to find disconcerting, settled next to him with a weary sigh.

“But you don’t have any bookshelves in your house,” Noodle continued. “All you have are plant shelves.”

“That’s because plants are alive, and books aren’t,” Jasper said.

This was only partially the truth. In many ways, books were more alive than most of the people he knew. They were living, breathing entities that changed each time you picked them up. When he was a young man, every book had been an opportunity to see the world from a place of safety and comfort, to travel to exotic destinations he’d been unableto afford and too shy to explore on his own. As a middle-aged man, he’d found books to be less about hope and more about finding the discrepancies between what fiction had promised and reality delivered.

And as an old man…well. He wasn’t sure about that part yet. These days, he was finding that damnable optimism creeping back in on agile legs.

Noodle hobbled forward and began running his hand over the damp, decaying spines of what used to be an excellent personal library. Time hadn’t been kind to those books—but then, it hadn’t been all that generous to Jasper, either. That was exactly why he’d left them out here. Not to rot but to be entombed.

“Have you really read all these?” Noodle asked.