Page 478 of Face Off
“Then it doesn’t count as mine.”
“I’ll remember that when you’re wearing it.”
Color warms her cheeks, but she keeps her attention on me as I reach behind the couch and retrieve the small gift bag I hid there last night. Cream tissue paper rises above dark-green paper, and one gold ribbon loops through the handles because the woman considers gift presentation evidence of moral character.
Charm sets her box beneath the tree and accepts the bag.
“You wrapped something.”
“I used a bag.”
“You coordinated the tissue paper.”
“The woman at the store did that.”
“You didn’t destroy it on the way home.”
“I’m capable of transporting paper.”
Her smile softens when she feels the weight. “What is it?”
“Open it.”
Charm removes the tissue paper carefully enough that I know she intends to save it. Her hand disappears into the bag and returns holding the battered clothbound novel she mailed me months ago.
She becomes completely still.
The cracked spine rests against her palm. Faded blue ink remains visible near the edges of several pages, left by a reader neither of us will ever know. Charm looks down at the book and then at me.
“You returned it.”
“You called it a loaner.”
“I did.”
“You said I had to place it back into your hands.”
Her fingers tighten around the cover. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything you say. It’s one of my more inconvenient qualities.”
She opens the book and turns immediately to the page carrying the sentence that made her buy it.
She would have understood this.
Charm touches the faded handwriting with the tip of one finger.
“You didn’t write in it,” she says.
“I couldn’t.”
Her eyes lift.
“Whoever owned it before us left an entire conversation in those margins. They argued with the narrator, underlined the lies, and trusted the honest sentences to stand without decoration. Writing over them felt like walking into someone else’s conversation and demanding the loudest voice.”
Understanding changes her expression. “Before us?”
My throat tightens. “Look inside the bag.”
