As Beatrix squinted to see past the grime on the windows, she realized that Violet was correct. All the piles of books looked like they had toppled over long ago, with no one to come along and line them up in neat stacks again.
If this was indeed a bookshop, no one seemed to have set foot in it for decades.
“It’s in a sorry state,” Beatrix sighed, pained at the thought of all those books waiting patiently for a reader to come along and pick them up.
Nothing quite captured the sense of loneliness that had recently settled within her own soul better than the shelves of books that rested beyond the glass, filled to the brim with stories that might never be shared. It made her remember what it had felt like that very morning at her writing desk as she tried and failed to put a single word on the page.
“We should find a way inside,” Violet announced, instantly snapping Beatrix’s attention away from her own worries and toward the trouble unfolding in the here and now.
“What?” Beatrix asked, the words coming out louder than she’d intended. “You can’t possibly mean that.”
But Violet was already walking toward the alleyway that separated the shop from its neighbor. It was so thin that she practically needed to turn sideways to fit, but that clearly wasn’t enough to stop her.
“Violet!” Beatrix hissed as she begrudgingly followed her sister into the damp shadows.
Beatrix shivered as the snow that had built up in the alley began to seep into her boots and opened her mouth to beg Violet to let them return home, where they could take off their icy socks and warm their toes by the fire.
But before she could say anything at all, she heard the familiar noise of a rusty handle giving way and then the slow creak of a door falling open.
“It’s unlocked,” Violet declared in disbelief before stepping inside.
Again, Beatrix began to argue that they should go home, but her warning was lost among the sound of something crashing to the ground within the shop, quickly followed by a slew of her sister’s most colorful curses.
“Are you all right?!” Beatrix cried as she rushed through the door, her hesitation forgotten in her worry for Violet.
But as soon as she stepped over the threshold, a sudden gust of wind snapped the door closed behind her, engulfing the room in complete darkness.
Startled, Beatrix drew in a gasp, but as she did, a familiar fragrance drifted to the forefront of her attention, instantly pulling her back into one of her fondest memories of the past.
It smelled of aged paper with the barest hints of vanilla, almonds, and the promise of a wellspun story—the same aroma that accompanies the sensation of fading between the pages of a book.
And for the first time in a long while, Beatrix remembered what it had felt like when her only fear was knowing that her fingers would eventually turn the last page.
She drew in another deep breath, trying to capture the fragrance again and the recollections that came along with it. But this time, a heavy undernote of dust and neglect caught in her throat, causing her to cough. As quickly as it had begun, the spell was broken, snapping her away from the enchantment of the past and toward the trouble unfolding in the present.
Beatrix hesitantly reached into the darkness, trying to find purchase as she listened to the sound of books tumbling to the floor crash against Violet’s curses.
Eventually, her palm met a wall, and as her fingers trailed along its tattered surface, she stumbled upon what felt like a gas lamp. Though the chances of it working with the shop being in such a state of disrepair seemed slim, something made Beatrix turn the knob anyway, and to her shock, a flame sparked to life, casting a comforting glow over the room.
As her eyes adjusted to the light, the details of the shop started to take shape against the shadows.
Beatrix realized with a start that many of the books had been thrown from the shelves and tossed to the floor, as if someone had knocked everything askew in a fit of fury. The covers were thrown open, and some of the spines had cracked, casting loose pages across the boards and tangling the different stories together in a riot of faded yellow paper and stark black ink.
It pained Beatrix to see so many words left to rot in the dirt and grime. But before she could so much as lean forward andpick up the nearest book from the floor, an unfamiliar voice filled the shop, booming from the direction of the alleyway.
“You’ve come after all!”
Beatrix’s gaze snapped to the open door, where a middleaged woman stood in the threshold with only a thin shawl to shield her shoulders from the harsh winter winds. She didn’t have the flushed cheeks and stiff posture of someone who’d been chilled to the bone, though. No, the woman merely looked as if she’d just stepped out of her home for a moment to grab the evening paper from the porch, the wide smile stretched across her face making her seem even warmer.
Beatrix opened her mouth to ask the stranger what she meant, but before she could utter a word, Violet lifted herself from the mountain of books that she’d fallen into and moved toward the woman, her arm extended in greeting.
“Yes!” Violet said with enthusiasm. “We’ve come.”
As she grasped the woman’s hand in her own, Violet turned toward Beatrix and winked.
“What a relief,” the woman replied as she moved deeper into the shop, trying to avoid stepping over the upturned book pages but failing to find a clear surface to place her sodden boots. Beatrix winced as she watched clumps of snow melt into the ink of what looked to be a novel, resisting the urge to reach out and save the story from its unfortunate fate. “I was so disappointed when I received your note this morning telling me that you weren’t interested in seeing the shop any longer. As you know from my letters, we’ve only recently inherited it, and my husband and I are eager to find a tenant. The apartment upstairs is in quite a state of disrepair, but the shop could be lovely with a bit of attention.”
Beatrix glanced at the upturned shelves and sea of papers set adrift across the floorboards and thought that it was going torequire quite a bit of attention indeed to get this place in working order.
