“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” I say, slipping beside my sister. About two minutes have passed since she made the call, but only crumbs remain on the ceramic cookie tray.
Brie collects the paper cups that line the counter and wipes herhands on her polka-dotted apron. Her brown shoulder-length hair is newly streaked with lime green. “I’ve got your back, Callie.”
“You are the best of sisters.”
As Brie pours several more cups of chocolate, handing them out to the children, I glance around the busy store until I find Kathleen and her son in the loft, snuggled together on a couch. Surely she knows that Scott once proposed marriage to me, but the fact that he was seeing both of us at the same time in the weeks before our wedding day doesn’t seem to bother her in the least. Unlike me, who can’t seem to move past the betrayal. The colossal failure in the spotlight of our town.
Two years come and gone, and I’m still stuck, wondering about what might have been while my ex-fiancé has clearly moved on.
“I wish you could let it go,” Brie whispers, and I worry for a moment that she might break out into song.
“It only bothers me when I see Kathleen around town.” And when I’m trying to ignore the bump swelling across her abdomen.
“The wounds of the heart take the longest to heal,” she says.
“But one day they heal, right?”
“You just have to meet the right man.”
I swipe one of the remaining cups of hot chocolate and step back before she starts listing the available men in our church and across Knox County.
When I was in my early twenties, I longed for a husband and children to love, a family who loved me back. But that would require dating again, and I have zero desire to expose the fragments of my heart and past to another man. I haven’t gone out with anyone since Scott, at least not more than one date and only at Brie’s insistence. Brie thinks a good man will steal my heartone day, but I doubt any decent thief would want the shattered pieces of it now.
Brie checks out two customers, slipping their books into white bags designed with a bouquet of balloons. Kathleen and Jack are moving toward the top floor of the castle.
“I’m done talking about men,” I whisper after the customers leave.
Her lavender-glossed lips pucker. “That’s good because I was planning to ask you about the box you broke into last night.”
I lean back against the papered wall. “Technically, it was already open.”
She sighs. “I wanted to give you that book for your birthday.”
“I promise to be surprised.”
Her head tilts slightly to the right as she assesses me. “At least you’ll be surprised when I give you your other gift.”
“You don’t have to give me anything else, Brie.” A little boy whizzes past, holding a book like a paper airplane in his hands. Sometimes I wonder how we make any profit at all. “Where exactly did you get thatBambibook?”
“From a dealer in Idaho.”
I sip the overly sweet chocolate. “I found something inside it.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Money?”
“No.”
“More pictures, then?”
“Wait here.” When I return to the counter, I open the worn cover for my sister and point down at Annika Knopf’s name.
She shrugs. “We find names in most of our used books.”
“But we’ve never found this.” I turn to the third page. “There are extra lines on some of these pages. The handwriting looks almost like the font in the printed text.”
As Brie examines the copy, I watch Kathleen’s son emerge from the slide at the bottom of the castle. His mother descends the spiral stairs to meet him, the bump under her shirt clearly visible as she reaches for his hand. Jealousy rears somewhere deep inside me, peeking its ugly head up over the wall that circles my heart.
“Did you translate any of this?” Brie asks, and my gaze falls back on the page.
