Colt fills the doorway. Six-foot-five of orc in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, messenger bag over one shoulder. Salt-and-pepperhair. Scarred hands. He ducks slightly coming through, the way he always does.
"Miss Frost." He nods.
"Mr. Rivers."
We've done this for months. He usually signs the pickup sheet. I hand him Lily's hold receipts. He thanks me. I tell him to have a nice evening. He tells Lily to get her things and then they leave. I lock up at five and drive home and eat dinner alone in an apartment full of books that don't leave.
But today is different. Lily spots him from the window table and waves him over with the urgency of someone flagging down air rescue. "Dad. Dad, come here. Look what Miss Frost pulled for me."
Colt crosses the library, ducking the display sign by the children's section. He bends to look at Lily's stack and his eyebrows rise behind the reading glasses.
"Octavia Butler?" He picks up the collection. "Parable of the Sower?"
"Miss Frost got me the whole list," Lily says. "She got the Ursula Vernon through interlibrary loan. It came from Eugene."
"Eugene." He glances at me over Lily's head, and one eyebrow lifts. "That's really going above and beyond, Miss Frost."
"Lily's reading list is worth the paperwork."
He sets the book down. Lily drags him to the community board near the entrance where Holly's photographs from the photography workshop hang—kids with disposable cameras, the harbor in afternoon light, and one shot I come back to every time I pass it: Colt and Lily from behind, walking past Betty's Diner, Lily's arm looped through his, both of them backlit by the late-autumn sun. Holly captured it. Neither of them knew she had the camera up, and the unselfconsciousness of the image does something to my chest that I refuse to name.
Colt studies it. He adjusts his glasses.
"Holly has an eye," he says.
"She does. She ran the workshop last month. Lily's work is right here." I point to the lower row. A close-up of rain on a fire escape. A shot of the library's front steps at dusk. "Your daughter has an eye too."
He adjusts his glasses again.
Lily shelves her holds herself. She insists, and she does it correctly, by Dewey Decimal, because I taught her the system in September and she took to it with the ferocity of someone who believes in order. She disappears into the stacks with her armful of books, the library gets quiet, and Colt stands at the circulation desk with nothing left to wait for.
His hand lands on the book next to the stamp pad. My copy ofMiddlemarch, dog-eared and spine-cracked, the Penguin Classics edition I've carried since college.
"You're reading George Eliot?"
"I've read her three times."
His eyebrows lift. "I used to teach her."
"Middlemarch specifically?"
"Victorian lit. Portland State." He leans against the counter and his reading glasses slide down his nose. He pushes them up with one scarred finger. "I built a whole seminar around marriage plots. Austen, Brontë, Eliot. Half my students signed up because they thought it'd be easy."
"Let me guess. It wasn't."
"Dorothea Brooke has a way of ruining people's expectations about romance." The corner of his mouth twitches. "I had a twenty-year-old kid tell me she made him rethink his entire relationship. He'd been dating his girlfriend for three weeks."
I laugh before I can catch it. "That's the best thing about teaching, though. When someone reads a book you've read a dozen times and shows you an angle you missed."
He looks at me. Not at the shelves, not at the stacks where Lily disappeared. At me. "Yeah," he says. "It is."
"They hired me because having an orc in the English department looked good on the brochure." He says it with a laugh. "Kept me for six years. Then enough parents called the dean about their daughters being in a classroom with a monster, and the department chair let me go and called it a 'restructuring.' She used the word 'climate' four times."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I got a motorcycle and a better job title out of it." His mouth quirks. "Secretary sounds impressive until people find out it means I balance a spreadsheet and argue with Knox about receipts."
I laugh. It comes out louder than I mean it to. I cover my mouth, but his focus has already dropped to where my fingers press against my lips. When it lifts back to my face, his expression has changed.
