Page 7 of The Library of Borrowed Hearts

I know you in the same way, C. You think there’s romance in poverty, but that’s only because you’ve never lived it.

That’s not fair.

Neither is being forced to watch you go to the dance on W’s arm. Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Try page 131.

“Ohhh, it’s a love affair gone wrong,” I murmured, my eyes wide. I sat back against the couch cushions, my heart doing a strange flip-flop in my chest. Gummy Bear grumbled but allowed me to shift. “What do you think, Gummy Bear? Should we keep going?”

He didn’t have an answer for me. It felt wrong to be reading these private notes, as if I were a voyeur on a wild choose-your-own-adventure ride, but the book had technically been found in the library. Even if someone had shown the foresight to hide it deep in the basement, library books were public property. I had every right to keep turning the pages.

So I did. And once I reached the page 131, there was only one sentence deeply underlined:There’s something perverse about women…they’re all masochistsat heart.

I chuckled aloud at this obvious play, but all communication stopped there. My girl C had no witty comebacks, no page numbers sending her annoyed lover to other quotes by way of reply. My interest in the laptop and my eBay listing now at an end, I settled deeper into the sagging cushions of the couch to read. I had zero interest in the book itself, but the marginalia were starting toseriouslyintrigue me.

Which was why the sound of a sudden knock startled me into a yelp. Gummy Bear cocked a quizzical ear, but he was so inured to the sounds of a young, chaotic household that he closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t so easily comforted.

“Who on earth could that be?” I asked as I swung my legs down and glanced up at the clock. Ten thirty on a school night. Notdangerouslylate for visitors, but certainly out of the ordinary.

The knock sounded again, sharper this time. Since the last thing I wanted was all three of my siblings tumbling out of their beds and demanding to know what was going on, I hopped up to answer it. As soon as I swung the door open to find who—and what—was on the other side, I stopped cold.

“Here.” A neon-yellow Frisbee was thrust through the gap at me. “I brought your brother’s thingamajig back.”

I accepted the toy with a blink. I blinked again as I took in the sight of Jasper Holmes standing in his full six-foot-tall glory on my front porch.

In theory, I knew Jasper wasn’treallya hermit. He could be seen buying his groceries every week in town, his black 1940s Ford truck cruising the streets almost as loudly and gas-guzzlingly as my own. He spent quite a bit of time at the garden and seed store, as his flowers could attest, and we’d even seen him at the annual Christmas pageant once, though he’d stormed out as soon as the baby Jesus started screaming for a diaper change. But he didn’t make social calls, and he definitely didn’t make them in the middle of the night.

Yet here we were.

“Do you…want to come in?” I asked, trying not to sound as unwelcoming as I felt. The four of us tried to keep the house in a habitable state, but I hadn’t yet mustered the energy to do the dishes and there were piles of unfolded laundry spilling over the love seat. That didn’t include the schoolbooks lying open on every surface or the dismantled old radio sitting frazzled on the coffee table. Bereft of even his toxic ammonia-and-bleach gas, Theo had been forced to strip the radio of parts to make a lemon-powered battery for his science project. Unless he could be bothered to put it away, the leftover parts would be sitting on that coffee table for months.

Jasper looked over my head and took it all in at a glance.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Most people would have at least pretended not to notice. “Well, I appreciate this all the same.” I waved the Frisbee. “Next time, you can just toss it over the fence. We’ll figure it out from there.”

Instead of accepting this polite dismissal, Jasper hesitated. He worked his jaw a few times, as if chewing on the words he didn’t want to say.

“That book,” he eventually said. “The one you mentioned from before.”

There was no inflection in his voice, just a curt summation of the facts. I decided to respond in kind.

“What about it?”

“I came to buy it from you.”

“You want to…buy it? From me?” I echoed. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d claimed to be Henry Miller rising from the grave to claim its authorship. “What for?”

He grunted. “Does it matter? You said you could get good money for it. I have good money. That’s all you need to know. Name your price.”

I’d been waiting my whole life to hear those words spoken aloud. I’d always dreamed of being the kind of person who could write a figure on a scrap of paper and slide it across the table, the kind of person who could walk into an office and say, “Give us the room,” with a complete absence of irony. In my head, I always played it cool, as if money wasn’t the one thing that I always feel a desperate, clawing yearning to possess.

Naturally, I didn’t play it cool at all. Instead, I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“One million dollars.”

A cracking sound that might have been a laugh escaped Jasper’s mouth. “Nice try. No book is worththatmuch.”