Page 70 of Safe With You

“Time, mostly. And every time I think about updating the website, something else feels more important.”

I nodded because I understood that better than she probably realized. The things that weren’t actively on fire tended to stay exactly where they were.

“That’s why I brought it up,” I said. “You’ve already done the hard part.”

She looked at me.

“What’s the hard part?”

“Building a place worth photographing.”

Her fingers stilled around her mug.

I clicked back to the homepage before I could think too much about the way she went quiet.

“The pictures are easy.”

Luna looked at the screen for another second before reaching for her notebook.

“Okay,” she said, flipping to a clean page. “What do you think we need?”

“We?”

She looked up. “You came in here with ideas. You’re involved now.”

“I didn’t realize that was how this worked.”

“It is today.”

I smiled and turned the laptop back toward myself.

“First, the storefront. What you have now isn’t bad, but it doesn’t show what the place looks like when people are actually here. Tuesday night did.”

“That was also eighty people packed inside.”

“Exactly.”

“I can’t hire eighty people to stand around every time we need a picture.”

“You don’t need eighty.”

I clicked back to the gallery and pulled up the photograph from outside the store. Even in the morning light coming through the windows around us, the warmth of Tuesday night came through on the screen.

“You need people,” I said. “The bookstore looks good empty, but that’s not what makes it interesting.”

Luna rested her chin against one hand.

“What does?”

I glanced around.

“The fact that people want to stay.”

Her eyes followed mine toward the front of the store.

The chairs from Open Mic Night were gone, and the tables had been returned to their usual places, but the room still carried pieces of the same feeling. A paperback sat facedown beside one of the armchairs near the window. Someone had left a handwritten recommendation card sticking out beneath a display. A ceramic mug waited upside down beside the espresso machine.

“It doesn’t look staged,” I continued. “That’s what I’d lean into. People browsing. Somebody sitting with coffee and a book. The café when it’s busy. Naomi working. You at the counter.”