“The whimsical free spirit bringing magic into everyone’s lives,” I say. “I’m familiar with that trope.”
“Some people call it magic,” he says. “I prefer to think of it as ‘raging stress hives.’ Carina was living in an Airbnb owned by a literal drug dealer until I booked her another place.”
I shudder. “That is exactly Libby in a parallel universe.”
“Little sisters,” he says, the twist of his mouth deepening the crease beneath his bottom lip.
I stare at it for a beat too long. My brain scrambles for purchase in the conversation. “What about your dad? What’s he like?”
He tips his head back. “Quiet. Strong. A small-town contractor who swept my mom so thoroughly off her feet that she decided to put down roots.”
At my self-satisfied look, he leans forward, matching my posture. “Fine, yes, they are the quintessential small-town love story,” he admits, eyes sparking as our knees press together. Under the table we’re playing a game of chicken: who will pull away first?
The seconds stretch on, thick and heavy as molasses, but we stay where we are, locked together by the challenge.
“All right, Stephens,” he says finally. “Let’s hear about your family. Where exactly do they fall in your catalogue of two-dimensional caricatures?”
“Easy,” I say. “Libby’s the chaotic, charming nineties rom-com heroine who’s always running late and is windblown in a cute and sexy way. My dad’s the deadbeat, absent father who ‘wasn’t ready to have kids’ but now, according to a paid PI, takes his three sons and wife out in their boat on Lake Erie every weekend.”
“What about your mom?” he asks.
“My mom . . .” I rearrange my own silverware, like they’re words in my next sentence. “She was magic.” I meet his eyes, expecting a sneer or a smirk or a storm cloud, but instead finding only a small crease inside his brows. “She was the struggling actress who chased her dreams to New York. We never had any money, but somehow, she made everything fun. She was my best friend. I mean, not just when we got older. As long as I can remember, she’d take us with her everywhere. And you know, for a lot of people who move to the city, it loses its glow in a couple years? But with Mom, it was like every single day was the first one.
“She felt so lucky to be there. And everyone fell in love with her. She was such a romantic. That’s where Libby gets it from. She started reading Mom’s old romance novels way too young.”
“You were close with her,” Charlie says quietly, halfway between observation and question. “Your mom?”
I nod. “She just made things better.” I can still smell her lemon-lavender scent, feel her arms around me, hear her voice—Let it out, sweet girl. Just one look and those five words, and it would all come spilling out. I do my best for Libby, but I’ve never had that kind of tenderness that slips past defenses.
When I look up, Charlie isn’t watching me so much as reading me, his eyes traveling back and forth over my face like he can translate each line and shadow into words. Like he can see me scrambling for a segue.
He clears his throat and hands me one. “I read some romance novels as a kid.”
My relief at the topic change rapidly morphs into something else, and Charlie laughs. “You couldn’t possibly look more evil right now, Stephens.”
“This is my delighted face,” I say. “Did they teach you anything helpful?”
He murmurs, “I could never share that information with a colleague.”
I roll my eyes. “So that would be a no.”
“Is that how you got into books? Your mom’s love of romance?”
I shake my head. “For me, it was this shop. Freeman Books.”
Charlie nods. “I know it.”
“We lived over it,” I explain. “Mrs. Freeman used to run all these programs, things that were free with the purchase of a book, and it made it easier for our mom to justify spending money. I was never stressed out there, you know? I’d forget about everything. It felt like I could go anywhere, do anything.”
“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.”
“In fact,” I say, “it’s discouraged.”
“Sometimes I think Goode Books could use a sign about it,” he replies. “It’s the reason I never tell customers to make themselves at home.”
“Right, because then the shoes and bras go flying, and the Marvin Gaye starts playing at top volume.”
“For every kernel of information you offer, Stephens,” he says, “there are a hundred new questions. And yet I still don’t know how you got into agenting.”
“Mrs. Freeman made these shelf-talker cards for us to fill out,” I explain. “Book Lovers Recommend, they said—that’s what she called us, her little book lovers. So I guess I started to think about books more critically.”
The crevice under his lip turns into an outright crevasse. “So you started leaving scathing reviews?”
“I got super stingy with my recommendations,” I reply. “And then I started just changing things as I read; fixing endings if Libby didn’t like how they played out, or if all the main characters were boys, I’d add a girl with strawberry blond hair.”
“So you were a child editor,” Charlie says.
“That’s what I wanted to do. I started working at the shop in high school and stayed there all through undergrad, saving up for Emerson’s publishing program. Then my mom died, and I became Libby’s legal guardian, so I had to put it off. A couple of years later, Mrs. Freeman passed away too, and her son had to cut half the staff to make ends meet. I managed to get an admin job at a literary agency, and the rest is history.”
There was more to it, of course. The year of balancing two jobs, napping in the hours between shifts. The knack I discovered for talking down panicking authors when their agents were out of office. The eventual bestselling novels I’d pulled out of the slush pile and forwarded to my bosses.
The offer to come on as a junior agent, and the list of cons I wrote out: I’d have to leave my waitressing gig; working on commission was risky; there was a chance I’d land us in the exact hole I’d been digging us out of since Mom’s death.
And then, in both the pro and con columns: now that I’d had a taste of working with books, how could I ever be happy with anything else?
“I gave myself three years,” I tell Charlie, “and a dollar amount I’d need to make, and if I didn’t reach it, I promised I’d quit and look for something salaried.”