“I will if I see you making eyes at Hunter Blakely.”
“Did you ever consider that maybe he’s very different from his grandmother? Kinda like how I’m very different from you?”
“Hmph. Doesn’t matter. A Blakely is a Blakely.”
“I’m beginning to see why people don’t like you, GamGam.”
I’m out the door before she can protest. It’s a quick jaunt down the stairs to the store, and I’m already pleased with my decision to reintroduce the secret stairwell.
Hunter looks up as soon as I’m visible. “Want to see what I’ve got?”
His notebook is laid out on the counter, open to show a neatdrawing of the store’s layout. I’m honestly impressed with his work.
“So if we take out all the shelves you have now, we can move the counter over here, right by the restroom door, which would make it harder to steal from and also leave these two main walls free for shelves. We’d do built-ins around this entire corner, with the rolling shelves in the middle and display tables in front. That’s what they usually do in bookstores, right?”
“Right. But maybe we could have some smaller shelves up here for cards and stickers? Gotta have gifties. And what’s this?”
I point to a rectangle to the side of the front door.
“Display area. Like the department stores in New York.”
I can feel my eyes getting hot and my throat closing up a little. “It’s perfect,” I say, my voice breaking a little. “Like you read my mind. But…how much is it going to cost?”
He points to neat figures, lines of numbers that seem to indicate lengths of wood. “I’ll go home, price things out, and let you know. I think we can look at two options. Really nice built-ins that would last a lifetime, or basically just boards on brackets with bookends. It would look more modern but cost considerably less without baseboards and trim. You’ll have to wait on that rolling ladder, though.”
“And what’s this circle?” I point to the drawing.
“The chandelier you wanted. We can go look in the antiques market, see if anything in there works for you. And I want to check the hardware store. Do you have those keys?”
I fetch the massive key ring out of my bag. “Hopefully. I also want to see the storage room. I’m not sure yet what can be tossed from the office, so I’m going to store the questionable boxes in there.”
He nods, all business. “Let’s go take a look. The storage roomshould be unlocked; I put Abraham’s things in there in case you wanted to go through them. Just don’t get your hopes up about the antiques—I don’t know what the raccoons have gotten into.”
“Well, for me, raccoons are a plus.”
I reach for the handle, but the storage room door won’t budge.
“That’s weird,” Hunter says. “It was fine ten minutes ago.”
Undeterred, I start trying different keys. Unfortunately, Maggie only marked the key to the apartment, so it’s just another guessing game. As I go through them, I am aware of Hunter standing beside me, watching me. His body is taut, on edge. I wonder if he is as aware of my physicality as I am of his. It makes me feel shy, to think he might be. It’s been so long since I’ve been attracted to someone new that everything about it feels like fumbling in the dark. And yet he is keeping an annoying distance between us because of—
I don’t even know! Something my grandmother did before I’d ever met her.
“Aha!”
I feel the key turn in the lock, but when I push the door, it doesn’t budge.
“That’sreallyweird.”
I turn the key back and forth a few times. It’s the only one that’s worked at all, but the door absolutely refuses to move.
“Can I try?”
I leave the key in the knob and step back to let Hunter take a turn. He shoves the door, nudges it with a hip, pulls it toward him, all the usual ways of getting a sticky door to behave, but the door might as well be cemented in place.
He pulls out the key and stares at it; it’s not unusual in any way and looks just as old and boring as one might expect. “It shouldn’t be doing that.”
“Well, I’ve got like a hundred more keys. Let’s go open the hardware store and see what’s going on from the other side.”
