Bookshop Daddy & Delivery Lads

A High-Heat MM Bookshop Quad Romance • by Jace Wilder

📖 Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM (Quad)

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap, Praise Kink, Throuple-Becomes-Quad, Polyamory, Why Choose, Found Family, Widower, Bookshop Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, Daddy Kink, Small Town

He spent eight years thinking his life was behind him. It was just waiting for him to look up.

Leonard Hawthorne is fifty years old, a widower of eight years, and the third-generation owner of a Vermont bookshop on a corner lot a developer named Marcus Vance has been quietly trying to take from his family for thirty-four years. Leo has spent the last decade running the shop alone, sleeping alone, and grieving alone — until a Tuesday in October when a moving crew shows up to haul in eight hundred books from a recently deceased local historian’s estate, and the crew turns out to be three twenty-four-year-olds who already love each other.

Jude is the steady one — the logistics brain who runs the crew and the lease and the checkbook, and who has never, in his life, let anyone take care of him. Finn is the brat — mouthy, wickedly smart, a college dropout who has been pretending he doesn’t still read everything on every shelf. And Riley is the quiet one — the foster-system kid who has spent his life waiting to be uninvited from rooms he was never sure he belonged in.

They have been a throuple for fourteen months. They are not looking for another fling. They are looking for the steady fourth they didn’t know was missing — and they walk into Hawthorne & Sons Antiquarian Books on a rainy Tuesday morning and find him bent over a first-edition Whitman behind the counter, with silver in his beard and grief in his shoulders, and they decide, between the three of them on the truck ride home, that they are going to ask.

What follows is six weeks of a fifty-year-old man learning how to be wanted — and, harder, how to want back — while a small-town developer with a thirty-four-year grudge tries to take his building, a sealed letter from his dead father surfaces in a 1925 Cather, and three twenty-four-year-olds, in his bed, in his shop, and in his life, slowly teach him that the door he has been afraid to walk through has been unlocked the whole time.

It is 115,000 words of slow-burn praise-kink quad romance, fully consummated and on the page in detail, with a black-moment reckoning that earns every line of the HEA — and a six-month epilogue with three separate scenes, one for each lad, before the four of them end up on the apartment couch with two cats and a dogwood coming in across the green.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Age-gap quad romance with a 50-year-old daddy and three 24-year-old lads who are already a throuple
Cozy autumn small-town Vermont with a corner-lot bookshop and a cat named Boswell
Praise kink as a love language — good boy said and meant, with each lad earning his own dialect of it
A widower learning how to want again without erasing the husband he lost
A villainous developer with a 34-year grudge and a sealed letter that takes him out
An elderly bookshop matriarch who calls the lads apprentices in the local paper before they have asked her to
Three distinct heat dynamics — a brat with a mouth, a service top who has never been topped, and a worship bottom waiting to be chosen first
Found family with formal partnership terms by the epilogue and a quad HEA on a couch with two cats

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⚠️ Content Notes

This is an explicit MM contemporary romance for adult readers (18+). Includes: an age-gap quad relationship (50/24/24/24), praise kink and Daddy kink (textual, fully negotiated), a polyamorous structure (existing throuple becomes a quad on page), grief and the loss of a husband eight years prior to the timeline (handled with care, photograph remains on the mantel through the HEA), references to a parental loss seventeen years prior, a small-business antagonist who attempts a quiet-title fraud and is publicly defeated, a single confrontation in which the antagonist drunk-shouts a cruel sentence at the protagonists in an alley (resolved on-page within the same chapter, antagonist arrested for DUI), a sagging building landing as a plot device (no injuries), and explicit on-page sex throughout including group scenes, edging, restraint with bookbinder’s twine, and creampie. Heat: 5/5 Inferno. Guaranteed happy ending with a formal quad partnership in the epilogue.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

The rain started at six-fourteen in the morning, which was two hours earlier than the forecast promised and four hours before the crew was due to arrive with eight hundred books.

I stood in the front window of the shop with a cup of coffee gone cold in my hand and watched Main Street turn from dry gray to wet black in the span of about ninety seconds. Boswell rubbed against my ankle, unimpressed by the weather and deeply committed to the theory that it was my fault.

“I know,” I told him. “Holloway’s heirs could have picked any Tuesday.”

He chirped at me, the particular chirp that meant if you were going to let this happen, the least you could do is feed me twice, and wandered off toward the fireplace.

I set the coffee down on the front counter and went to get the drop cloths.

Hawthorne and Sons had seen worse weather in its seventy-eight years of standing on the corner of Main and Chestnut. My grandfather had unloaded the first crates of inventory in a February blizzard in 1948, if the framed photo behind the register was to be believed, and my father had weathered the flood of ‘73 with nothing worse than a warped baseboard in the children’s section. A September rainstorm was not going to be the thing that killed us.

But eight hundred books from the estate of the late James Holloway were eight hundred books that had spent the last fifty years in a climate-controlled library in a Colonial on Elm Street, and I was not about to let them get rained on in the last hundred feet of their journey.

I spread drop cloths from the front door to the basement stairs. I rolled up the Persian runner and leaned it against the rare-books case on the second floor. I moved Boswell’s food and water bowls out of the hall and into the nook, which he considered an unforgivable breach. I checked the basement lights, the basement dehumidifier, and the basement staging table, in that order. I made a fresh pot of coffee, because three men were about to work in the rain for four hours and the least I could do was meet them with something hot.

By nine-fifty I was out of things to do, and I sat down in one of the leather club chairs by the fireplace and tried, without success, to read.

The Holloway estate was the largest acquisition the shop had handled in eleven years. James Holloway had been a local historian and a collector who understood what he was collecting, which was a combination rarer than either trait alone. I’d driven out to the Colonial six weeks ago with my appraisal loupe and my notebook and I’d spent two hours walking the library with his granddaughter, a pleasant woman in her forties who wanted the books gone before the house sold. I had priced the collection low, because I liked her, and high, because I knew what was in it. One of those two things was a mistake. I still wasn’t sure which.

What I was sure of was that one of the books was, if I was right, a first issue of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Green cloth. Gilt-stamped. Whitman’s face in profile on the frontispiece, looking like he knew something you didn’t. I had not told the granddaughter that, because I had not yet confirmed it, and because if I was right the entire acquisition was going to pay the shop’s property taxes for the next four years.

If I was wrong, I had just written a check I couldn’t cover.

I did not let myself think about the check.

At ten-oh-two a white box truck pulled up to the curb with QUILL AND CREW — HAULING, CLEAROUT, ESTATES painted on the side in a font that looked like it had been designed by someone who had opinions. The driver’s door opened. A tall blond kid in a gray henley swung out, looked at the sky, said something to whoever was in the passenger seat that made him laugh, and pulled a clipboard out from behind the seat.

I set down my book.

Kent, at Kent Movers over in Rutland, had retired in May. I had used Kent for twenty-two years. His replacement, a polite woman named Marta who ran the dispatch, had told me on the phone that she was subbing me out to a smaller local crew this time because Kent had sold his fleet and her own trucks were booked. She said the crew was new but good. She said the lead was a hauler’s hauler, the kind who read the paperwork instead of just signing it. She said I’d be happy.

I had told her I was sure I would be, in the tone of a man who was not sure at all, and then I had forgotten about it for six weeks.

The tall blond kid came around the front of the truck. He was maybe six feet, broad through the shoulders in a way that suggested he had moved furniture for a living long enough for it to shape him. Dirty-blond hair, stubble, a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind one ear. He moved like a man who knew exactly where every door frame was. He reached the curb, looked up at the shop’s painted sign, and nodded once, approving, the way you nod at a building you’ve already decided to be careful with.

Then the passenger door opened and a redhead slid out into the rain.

He was shorter than the blond — five-ten, maybe — and wiry where the blond was solid, and he was already talking. I couldn’t hear him through the window, but I could see his mouth moving and his hands moving and the blond laughing at him over the hood of the truck. He was wearing a flannel with the sleeves pushed up and jeans that had been washed into submission and boots that had seen a lot of basements. His hair was too long and cut badly and the rain was already plastering it to his forehead. Freckles. I could see freckles from thirty feet away through a rain-streaked window, which was the first indication I had that my morning was about to become complicated.

A third kid climbed down from the back of the truck. Smaller than the other two, compact, dark-haired, olive-skinned. He landed on the sidewalk and pushed his hood up against the rain and said something to the redhead that made the redhead shove him, gently, the shove of a person who was being affectionate and didn’t know any other way to express it.

Three of them. Marta had said three. I had forgotten that part too.

The blond reached the door first and held it open for the other two, which told me most of what I needed to know about who ran the crew. Then he stepped in behind them and pulled the door shut against the rain and looked around the shop with the kind of slow, professional appraisal I usually gave to other people’s libraries.

“Mr. Hawthorne,” he said. His voice was lower than I’d expected. “Jude Kane. Quill and Crew. We’re your ten o’clock.”

“Leo,” I said, standing up. “Please. Mr. Hawthorne was my father.”

“Leo.” He nodded, once, and extended a hand. His grip was dry and firm and exactly as long as it needed to be. “This is Finn — Finn Quill, that’s his truck out there — and that’s Riley. We’ve got the Holloway manifest in the cab. You want to walk us through where you need it?”

“Holloway’s granddaughter sent the manifest ahead,” I said. “Eight hundred and forty-two volumes, by her count. I counted eight hundred and fifty-three when I was out there, but I don’t think she and I were counting the same things.”

The redhead — Finn — was already wandering. He had not introduced himself, had not shaken my hand, had walked past me like a cat walks past a person who has not yet earned eye contact, and was now standing in front of the Poetry shelf with his head tilted to one side, reading spines.

“She wasn’t counting the pamphlets,” he said, without turning around.

I was, I would later decide, already in trouble at that point. But I didn’t know it yet. I said, mildly, “No, she wasn’t.”

“Pamphlets are books,” Finn said. His finger traced along a row of Whitmans I had pulled out that morning for comparison purposes, not touching the spines, just near them. “That’s the whole fight. Nineteenth century, there’s no difference. You bind something, it’s a book.”

“That’s one position.”

“It’s the right position.” He turned then, finally, and looked at me. His eyes were blue, which I had not expected, and there was a spark in them that was eighty percent challenge and twenty percent something I was not going to name at ten oh four in the morning. “You count eight fifty-three, I bet you counted the pamphlets.”

“I counted the pamphlets.”

“See,” he said, to Jude, without breaking eye contact with me, “I told you this was the good gig.”

Jude’s mouth did something at the corner that was not quite a smile. “Finn. Truck.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Finn peeled himself away from the Poetry shelf and moved past me toward the door, close enough that I got a whiff of him — rain, coffee, some kind of cheap soap that smelled like cedar — and out into the weather without looking back.

Jude watched him go. Then he turned to me, and his expression was flat professional again, but I had the distinct sense I had just been evaluated and I was not entirely sure what the verdict was.

“Finn reads the inventory,” he said. “It’s a thing. Don’t take it personally.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good. Where do you want the basement load?”

I walked him through the route: front door, drop cloth, hall runner removed, left at the register, down the basement stairs — narrow, watch the third one, it’s got a lip — and onto the staging table at the bottom. Rare and fragile up to the second floor through the side stairs, which were wider. Anything labeled Green on the manifest went directly to the locked case on the second floor and I would sign for those personally, each one, as they came up.

“Green?” Jude said.

“Leaves of Grass,” I said, and did not elaborate.

He looked at me for a second. He was, I was beginning to understand, a person who missed very little. Then he nodded. “Green direct to you upstairs. Got it.”

The compact one — Riley — had been standing by the door the entire time, hands in his hoodie pockets, listening. When Jude turned to look at him, he straightened like a soldier called to line.

“Riley’s on seconds,” Jude said. “He’ll be in and out of the basement. Finn runs the truck. I’m the floater. That work?”

“That works.”

“Okay.” He looked at his clipboard. “We’ll bring the first load in now and see how the rain treats us. If it gets worse we’ll tarp the bed and slow down. We’re not losing a book today, Leo.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Kent said you were good people. We’re going to be good people back.”

He said it plainly, without performance, the way a man says a thing he actually means, and I had a small unwelcome moment where I thought: I am going to like this kid, and I don’t want to.

Then he turned and went out into the rain, and I was alone in the shop with Riley for approximately eleven seconds before Riley noticed he was alone in the shop with me and turned pink.

He was smaller than the other two, closer to my shoulder than my chin. Dark eyes — amber, actually, in the lamp light, which was a color I did not often see on a person. His dark hair was cut short on the sides and a little longer on top and curling from the damp. He had a tattoo sleeve on his right arm — botanical, ferns and something that might have been nightshade — and a constellation of small silver rings in one ear. He was very young and very awake and he was looking at my left shoulder because he had not, yet, decided if he was allowed to look at my face.

“You can sit down,” I said. “The chair by the fire. It’s the warmest spot.”

“I shouldn’t — Jude’s gonna —”

“Jude is bringing in a crate. You have about ninety seconds before he needs you. Sit down, Riley. You’re wet.”

He sat down. He sat down the way a polite person sits down in someone else’s house, perched on the edge of the leather, hands folded in his lap, not quite touching the arms.

“I can get you a towel,” I said.

“No, sir, I’m —”

“Riley.”

“— yes.”

“I’m getting you a towel.”

I went to the back and got one of the soft gray towels from the employee bathroom, the ones Mrs. Pell bought in bulk because she said if we were going to have a cat we were going to have cat-quality towels, and I brought it back and handed it to him. Our fingers did not touch. He took it with both hands the way a small child takes something breakable.

“Thank you,” he said, very quietly.

“You’re welcome.”

He dried his hair. He dried his face. He folded the towel into a neat square on his lap when he was done and put his hands on top of it like he was afraid it might get away from him.

The front door banged open. Finn came through backwards with a crate in his arms that was bigger than his torso, and said, “Hawthorne, where am I going — basement, right, basement — ” and kept moving without waiting for an answer. Jude came in behind him with a second crate, saw Riley by the fire, saw the towel, saw me, did not change expression in any visible way, and said, “Riley. Door.”

Riley was up and moving before Jude had finished saying his name. He handed the towel back to me as he passed. He said, “Thank you, sir,” again, very quietly, very fast, and then he was at the front door holding it for the next crate and I was standing by the fire with a damp towel in my hand.

I had called him sweetheart.

I had not, actually, said the word out loud. I had only almost said it — when I’d first handed him the towel, when he’d looked up at me with those eyes that did not know they were allowed to look at my face yet, I had felt the word rise up in my throat and I had swallowed it down.

But he had heard me not say it. I was sure of that. I had seen it in the way he’d sat down without arguing the second time.

I took the towel to the back room, hung it to dry, stood for a moment with my hand flat against the wall above the laundry sink, and told myself, very clearly, that I was going to behave.

Then I went back out to sign for books.

The rain did not stop. By noon it was heavier. By one o’clock it was the kind of rain that sounded like a drumline on the shop’s front awning, and Finn came through the door with his flannel soaked through and his hair plastered to his skull and said, “Okay, we’re tarping. Give us ten,” and vanished again.

Jude was on the basement stairs with a crate of octavos when I came down to check on the staging. He set the crate on the table, straightened, wiped his hands on his jeans, and said, “We’re about a third through. With the tarping and the break for lunch we’ll finish today but it’ll be close to five.”

“That’s fine. I’ll pay the overtime.”

“Kent would have charged you overtime. We don’t, on estates. First job with a new client, we eat it. Call it a handshake.”

“That’s generous.”

“It’s business.” He looked at me for a second, then at the staging table, then at the basement in general, the way a man looks at a room he is cataloging without meaning to. “This is a good space. You’ve got the humidity right. Most of the old-book guys I’ve worked for have their basements too dry.”

“You’ve done a lot of estate work?”

“Some. Riley and I came up through commercial moving. Finn’s father did clearouts and Finn grew up on the truck. We’ve been running the three of us since June.” He paused. “I’m supposed to be selling you, I realize. I’m doing a bad job of it.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Kent said you’d be easy.”

“I don’t know about easy.”

“Easier than the last guy we subbed for. He wanted us to wear company polos.” He almost smiled. “Not our color.”

From above, through the floorboards, I heard Finn shout something cheerful and profane, and Riley shout back, and one of them laugh.

“They’re good kids,” I said, without meaning to.

Jude looked at me. His expression did not change, exactly, but something behind his eyes sharpened.

“They are,” he said. “Yes.”

And then he went back up the stairs, and I stood in the basement with the dehumidifier humming and my heart doing something stupid and told myself, again, that I was going to behave.

At two-thirty they broke for lunch. I had pulled sandwiches from the deli down the block — turkey, roast beef, a vegetarian in case, plus chips and four bottles of water — and set them out on the back counter with a note that said eat something. When I came up from the basement Jude was already washing his hands at the utility sink and Riley was hovering near the sandwiches without touching them and Finn was nowhere to be seen.

“He’s upstairs,” Jude said, without being asked. “Reading. I’ll pull him down.”

“Let him read.”

Jude paused, a paper towel halfway to his hands. “He hasn’t eaten since five.”

“Then pull him down after he finishes the page. Riley, which sandwich.”

“I — whichever nobody —”

“Riley.”

“Turkey, please. Sir.”

“Leo.”

“Leo.” He ducked his head, took the turkey, did not unwrap it, stood holding it like it was a library book he needed to check out first.

I went upstairs.

Finn was in the reading nook. He was sitting with his back against the window, his boots up on the cushion — he’d put a towel under them, which I noticed — and a book open on his chest. He had taken his wet flannel off and hung it on the bannister and he was in a thin gray t-shirt that was, itself, damp in the collar from his hair. He was reading a copy of Leaves of Grass that he had, somehow, taken off my shelf.

“That’s the 1867,” I said, from the stairs.

“I know.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“I figured.” He turned a page without looking up. “You’ve got two copies of the 1867. The one on the shelf is waiting for a buyer. This one’s got a pencil note on the flyleaf in your handwriting that says Daniel’s copy — NEVER — in capitals, and I’m not a complete asshole, so.”

I came up the last three stairs.

He looked up then. The light through the window behind him was gray and wet and made a halo around the bad haircut. His eyes were so blue in that light it was almost a problem.

“Sorry,” he said. He did not sound sorry. “I heard you say the word Whitman this morning and I wanted to see what you had.”

“You read Whitman.”

“I read everything.”

“Lunch is downstairs.”

“Jude send you?”

“No. Jude said to let you finish the page.”

Something flickered across his face — something small and surprised and quickly shuttered. He closed the book. He put it on the cushion next to him, careful, spine-down so as not to crack it. He swung his legs off the cushion and stood up, and he was suddenly much closer to me than he had been, because the nook was not large and I had not stepped back.

“You’re not what I pictured,” he said.

“What did you picture.”

“Older.”

“I’m fifty, Finn.”

“Yeah.” He tilted his head. Up close the freckles were worse. They were scattered across the bridge of his nose and both cheeks and down under the collar of the t-shirt where I was absolutely not going to look. “You’re fifty and you don’t look fifty. Which is annoying, because I had a whole — you know what, never mind.”

“You had a whole what.”

“A whole plan for how this gig was going to go,” he said, “and now I have to redo it, and I haven’t had lunch.”

“Go have lunch.”

“I was getting to that, Hawthorne.”

He went past me down the stairs. He did not brush me on the way, but he passed close enough that I felt the heat come off his damp t-shirt, and he smelled, again, like cedar soap and rain, and underneath that like the particular smell of a person who had been carrying boxes in the wet for four hours, which should not have been attractive and was.

I stood in the nook for a moment after he was gone.

The 1867 was still on the cushion, spine-down, exactly where he had set it. He had put a bookmark in it — one of my own bookmarks, from the bowl by the register downstairs, because he had been in my shop for four hours and he had already figured out where the bookmarks were.

I picked it up. The bookmark was at the Calamus poems.

Of course it was.

They finished at four-fifty, ten minutes under. The rain had dropped back to a drizzle by the last load, and Jude had his crew moving in a tight, unshowy rhythm — Finn up the ramp with the crates, Riley receiving inside the door, Jude on the basement end placing each one on the staging table like he was setting a table for a dinner party. I watched them for the last twenty minutes because I could not make myself go back to my desk. I watched Jude’s hands, mostly. They were broad and scarred across the knuckles and they held the crates the way I had, once, seen a veterinarian hold a cat that was frightened.

At four-fifty-one Jude straightened up from the table, wiped his hands on his jeans, looked around the basement, and said, “That’s it. Eight hundred and fifty-one. Two short of your count.”

“The pamphlets.”

“The pamphlets are on the staging table with a rubber band around them. I counted them as one lot, because I’m not Finn.”

From the top of the basement stairs, Finn’s voice, cheerfully: “I heard that.”

Jude ignored him. “You’ll want to verify tonight. We’re going to need to come back at least three more times — you saw the size of it. I can do Thursday, Saturday, and next Tuesday, or we can spread it out. Your call.”

“Thursday, Saturday, and Tuesday.”

“Three days.”

“I’d rather not leave Holloway’s widow’s house half-packed for a week.”

“Granddaughter.”

“Granddaughter. I’d rather not leave her half-packed.”

“Thursday ten a.m., Saturday ten a.m., Tuesday ten a.m.”

“Yes.”

He wrote it on his clipboard. He did not say anything else for a moment, and I did not say anything either, and the basement dehumidifier hummed, and upstairs Finn was saying something to Riley in a low voice that ended in a laugh, and I was, I realized, standing with my arms crossed in a way that I did when I was trying not to do something.

Jude looked up from the clipboard.

“Leo,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Thursday. Ten a.m.”

“Yes.”

He nodded, once, and put the clipboard under his arm, and went up the stairs.

I followed him up a minute later. The shop was full of damp-crew smell and wet wool and somebody — Riley, it turned out — had refolded the drop cloths into tidy rectangles by the door and stacked them where they would dry. Finn was by the register with the 1867 in his hand, and he put it back on the shelf, gently, spine aligned, as I came up.

“I put it back,” he said.

“I see that.”

“I didn’t fold the page.”

“I know.”

He looked at me. He had his flannel back on, wet. His hair was drying wrong, sticking up in three directions. He had an ink smudge on his jaw from God knew what. I wanted, with a clarity that was almost embarrassing, to touch the smudge with my thumb and see what he did.

I put my hands in my pockets.

“Thursday,” he said.

“Thursday.”

“Ten a.m.”

“Jude told me.”

“Jude tells you things twice when he thinks you’re going to forget them. I’m telling you a third time because I don’t think you’re going to forget them.”

He grinned at me. It was a grin with a lot of teeth in it. Then he went out into the drizzle, and Riley followed with a small quick wave he did not quite let himself finish, and Jude went last and pulled the door shut behind him. Through the front window I watched them get back into the truck. Finn in the driver’s seat. Jude riding. Riley folded into the small jump seat in the back, already talking, his hands going.

They pulled away from the curb. The truck took the corner at Chestnut and was gone.

I stood in the front of my shop in the gray light and listened to the rain on the awning.

Boswell came out from wherever he had been hiding during the noise and wound himself around my ankle.

“I know,” I told him. “I know.”

I closed at five-thirty.

I turned the sign. I locked the door. I turned off the register light and the front lamps and the display case on the second floor, and I left the basement light on because I always left the basement light on — my father had left the basement light on for forty-one years and I had never asked him why and now it was just what Hawthornes did.

I went upstairs to my apartment.

I stood in the kitchen for a long time, not doing anything, with my hand on the counter.

I had not felt my own body in eight years.

That was not quite true. I had felt it in the sense that I had lived inside of it, and eaten, and slept, and walked, and carried crates, and taken it to the doctor twice a year because Daniel had made me promise. I had felt it in all the ways a person feels his body when he is mostly waiting for it to be done.

What I had not felt, in eight years, was the particular electric stupidity of wanting. The thing that happens in your chest and your stomach and, God help me, lower, when a person walks into your life sideways and your body — which you thought had retired — sits up and says wait, hold on.

It had happened three times today.

I went into the bathroom and washed my face in cold water and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. Silver at the temples. Silver in the beard. The lines at the corners of my eyes that Daniel had liked, had pressed his thumb into once and said these are mine, I made these. I was fifty years old. I was a widower. I owned a bookshop that might or might not be solvent depending on what a dead historian had hidden inside his copy of Whitman.

I had three delivery boys coming back on Thursday.

One of them had looked at my left shoulder until I told him he could sit down. One of them had watched me like I was a building he had decided to be careful with. One of them had read the pencil note in my dead husband’s book and put it back without folding the page.

I was not, I thought, going to behave.

I washed my face again, because it was the only thing to do.

Downstairs, through the floor, the basement dehumidifier kept humming. Somewhere in the stacks on the staging table, between an octavo of Emerson and a pamphlet on New England wildflowers, was, or was not, an 1855 first issue of Leaves of Grass.

I would go down in the morning and find out.

For now I took off my glasses, set them on the counter, pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, and admitted to the empty apartment what I had refused to admit to the empty shop.

“Oh, hell,” I said.

Boswell, from the doorway, chirped his agreement.

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A scene set six months after the epilogue, on the morning of the second-shop opening. Jude’s thirty-fifth birthday. A new henley, a fountain pen, a desk in a back office, and four men eating muffins in the dark before the door opens. Free for readers, exclusive to fractalenigma.com.

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