Page 77 of Nikolay

There it was. The price. $3.95 on the inside front flap.

My pulse thudded once against the base of my throat.

I checked the back panel. Harper Lee’s portrait stared out in soft gray scale, and in the lower right corner sat Truman Capote’s photo credit like a final little blade of certainty.

I swallowed.

The Jonathan Daniels blurb was there.

So were the reviews—Shirley Ann Grau, Phyllis McGinley—exactly where they ought to be, all the little markers any book lover with a half-obsessive streak learned to look for when the thing in her hands might be history instead of merely paper.

Every sign was present.

Every one.

It was real.

My vision blurred.

“Oh, no,” I said to nobody, because the tear escaped before I could stop it.

I yanked the book away from my face so fast it probably looked ridiculous, holding it out at arm’s length like distance alone could save it from me. One hot tear slid down my cheek and hung from my jaw. I scrubbed it away with the heel of my hand before a second one got ideas.

“I am not,” I muttered, voice wobbling once before I forced it level, “going to be the woman who ruins a priceless first edition with her feelings.”

The book remained safe.

That mattered more than my dignity.

I sat there breathing through the sting in my eyes until the blur passed and the room settled back into focus. Then I drew the novel carefully back toward me and ran one thumb—not on the jacket, never on the jacket, but along the edge of the protective wrap beneath it—with a reverence that felt almost religious.

He had realized.

Not only that I loved the book. Not only that I had slapped his hand away from my own dog-eared copy because he had not earned the right to touch it. He had understood the shape of the apology. Understood that replacing my old copy would have insulted me and that giving me a clean modern edition would have missed the point entirely. He had gone looking for the version that mattered to somebody like me. He didn’t know I had a nicer early edition in addition to my well-loved, well-read copy. But nothing like this. I’d never be able to afford something like this.

Nobody had ever done anything like that for me. Not ever.

Not some grand, expensive thing chosen because money could solve embarrassment. Not a practical favor. Not a gift-card kind of gesture. This was attention. This was listening hard enough to hear what a person prized and then respecting it enough to place something extraordinary in her hands.

That hit somewhere too deep to look at straight on.

I closed the cover gently and laid the linen wrapping back around it. Fold by fold, crease by crease, I dressed the book again with the same care I had used unwrapping it. Then I climbed off the bed, carried it to the desk, and set it down near my other books where it belonged for now.

My palms flattened on the wrapped parcel.

I stood there like that for a long moment, head bowed, staring at the cream linen under my hands.

Nobody had ever done anything like this for me.

Not a boyfriend. Not some guy trying to impress me. Not family. Not anybody.

And now the impossible vampire prince with the scholar’s mouth and the lethal self-control had gone and chosen violence by first edition.

I laughed once under my breath, though there wasn’t much humor in it. Only disbelief and the ache that often came with being given something your heart had not rehearsed how to receive.

“I need to say something,” I told the silent room.

The room, being unhelpful, offered nothing.