A month of planning meetings with Scott, of letters with Coastal Quill, and trying to figure out why both of them make my heart do complicated things.
The book club would say I’m living in a romance novel and refusing to recognize my own tropes. Michelle would say the universe is trying to tell me something. Caroline would say I need to watch more Hallmark movies because apparently my pattern recognition is broken.
But right now, in this moment, I’m just Jessica Wells—bookstore owner, reader, woman with a judgmental cat and two men who confuse her in completely different ways.
One of them writes letters that feel like coming home.
The other argues with me about event logistics like it’s the most fun he’s had all week.
And somehow, impossibly, both of them make me want to be brave enough to find out what happens next.
EIGHT
SCOTT
Between the Lines’s letter arrives on Friday morning, and I read it standing in my kitchen in my boxers, eating cold leftover pizza like the sophisticated adult I am.
She’s glad I said yes. She’s terrified too. She’s been counting the weeks.
And then I get to the part that makes me choke on my pepperoni.
She mentions spending her evening planning “your reveal event” with someone who makes her want to argue about seating charts. Someone infuriating and unexpected. Someone who made her a column for wild cards in his perfectly organized document.
The strangest act of kindness anyone’s ever shown me.
She’s talking about me.
She’s writing to Coastal Quill about Scott Avery, and she doesn’t know we’re the same person, and she called me infuriating and unexpected and said the wild card column was a kindness.
She thinks about me. Enough to write about me in her letters.
To me.
She’s writing to me about me.
I sit down heavily on my kitchen stool, miss the stool entirely, and end up on the floor with my dignity in shambles.
This is going to be a very long few weeks.
The second planningmeeting happens Saturday afternoon at the Twin Waves Public Library, a gorgeous old brick building with tall windows that let in the July sun.
“The AC is broken,” Mrs. Kaplan announces cheerfully as we file in, fanning herself with a paperback copy of a murder mystery. “Has been since Tuesday. Repair guy says Monday, maybe. There’s lemonade in the back. Try not to die.”
The meeting room is approximately nine hundred degrees. Someone has propped open every window, which lets in the smell of salt air and sunscreen and the distant sound of children screaming on the beach. A ceiling fan rotates lazily overhead, accomplishing nothing except moving the hot air in a circle.
Grayson takes one look at the room and starts unbuttoning his shirt collar. “This is inhumane.”
“This is summer,” Michelle says, already glistening. “You should be used to it.”
“I spent fifteen years in climate-controlled office buildings. I’ve gone soft.”
“You’re sweating through your shirt.”
“I’m aware. Thank you for announcing it.”
I’m trying very hard not to sweat through my own shirt, which is a losing battle. I wore a button-down to be professional, which was a mistake. I look like a man slowly being poached.
Jessica arrives last, bursting through the door with her massive tote bag, her hair escaping from its bun in approximately forty directions. She’s wearing a sundress thecolor of sunflowers and sandals that slap against the floor with every step.
