Part 2
“If light is in your heart, you will find your way home.”
—Rumi
35Karla
Nine Years Later
There were a million reasons why I shouldn’t have been happy on a cold, moody Saturday evening. My insurance company just raised the price on one of the new medicines I’d been using for my back pain. It was raining cats and dogs all day, and on my way into work, my favorite dress was splashed and ruined by someone driving a semitruck who blared their horn at me. On top of all that, my favorite coffee shop stopped making my favorite peppermint and matcha drink. In the grand scheme of things, it should’ve been an overall terrible day, but it wasn’t.
It was one of the best days of my life, if not the best day, because I was officially opening the doors to a place I’d been dreaming about for the past ten years.
Second Chance. My bookstore baby had come to life.
A part of me could hardly believe that I’d managed to pull it off. Another part of me knew that without my family, it would’ve never happened. Dad, Ellie, Lorelai, and Grandma Claire were all at the ribbon cutting.
Ellie and Dad were such big influences in my life, and even though for a long time I struggled with Ellie and Dad falling in love, I knew I owed so much to Ellie for helping my father find his way back to living again. Before Ellie came along, Dad’s spirit died the same day Mom had. Yet Ellie breathedlife back into his cold soul. She helped him find his way back home to us.
It was amazing how much could change in ten years. When I learned that Ellie and Dad had fallen in love, I did not handle it well at first. It took a long time for me to come around to the idea that a person could have more than one love of their life. Yet Dad and Ellie were both patient with me. They didn’t rush anything, and I was grateful for that.
If you would’ve asked fourteen-year-old Karla if she ever thought Ellie Gable would turn out to be one of her best friends, she would’ve called you a fool.
Then again, fifteen-year-old Karla would’ve never thought she’d make it to age twenty-five. There were moments when she didn’t think she’d make it to her sweet sixteen.
Yet there I was, still alive. And there my heart was, too, still beating.
Ellie was the one who pushed me to open up Second Chance—a used bookstore and bar that allowed old, abandoned books to get their second chance at being discovered once more.
Every year, around 320,000,000 books were discarded into landfills, contributing to almost 700,000 tons of waste. When I heard that, it shattered me with the idea of how many stories were abandoned and left unknown. How many of those books had a small print run, too, and may never be read again?
As a chronic rereader, that thought alone broke my heart.
Not to mention how much of an environmental impact recycling books had on the world. It was a way to conserve trees. If only I had a way to convince people that they didn’t always need new books, because the old ones still had the same heart to them. The world seemed to overconsume, and I wanted to do my small part to try to combat that concept. Plus, my favorite thing about used books was the heartbeats they heldwithin them: the unique discoveries one could find from the previous owners of the books lying against the pages. Small scribbles. Favorite lines underlined. Annotations. Coffee stains and greasy thumbprints. Even old, faded ticket stubs could be rediscovered as bookmarks. I once found a concert ticket from Britney Spears’s One More Time Tour from July 1999. That felt important. Like a piece of history resting in a safe place.
There was something so heartwarming about seeing glimpses of another in the same pages you were now reading.
I was sure that’s what it would’ve been like walking down the same streets of Bath, England where Jane Austen used to wander and dream. Or sit in the same theaters where Shakespeare sat. There was history in every single book that had once been loved.
But maybe that was just the hopeless romantic inside of me.
Fourteen-year-old Karla would’ve been shocked about that fact, too—that I became a hopeless romantic. Maybe not with men, but with my book collection? Forever in love.
Plus, my favorite thing about novels was that an amazing story didn’t expire. A book published in the sixties could’ve easily saved a person’s soul in 2025. That was the magic of the written word—it was timelessly healing.
That afternoon, we were having a party to celebrate the grand opening of Second Chance Bookshop. I was excited to have all my loved ones come through to have a few cocktails and mocktails while listening to a few local authors read from their favorite books. I was also revealing my personal favorite corner of the shop: Nicole’s Reading Nook—a comfy, cozy reading corner named after my beautiful mother. It was Ellie’s idea to tie in the reading nook, and it turned out to be my favorite thing ever.
That was another fact about Ellie that I loved; she never tried to erase Mom’s memory—she only tried to preserve it.Lorelai was young when Mom passed away, and she didn’t have many memories of what it was like growing up with our mother’s love, but Dad and I worked tirelessly to tell stories about the woman who loved us. And instead of being jealous by the idea of this, Ellie always listened with such wonderment in her eyes, and she’d comment about what a beautiful woman my mom had been.
For a long time, I searched endlessly for Ellie’s flaws. I always came up empty-handed.
“Karla, this is remarkable,” Lorelai sang as she walked through the front door of the shop. She went to grab a glass of champagne from a tray that was floating around, and I instantly grabbed it from her hand.
“You still have a few years until you can actually drink that, turd,” I scolded her.
She rolled her eyes and waved her hand at me. “A little champagne ain’t ever hurt anyone.”
“You’re sixteen, Lorelai. You’ve got a ways to go before you’re allowed to let champagne hurt or not hurt you.”
