Page 2 of Comfort Read

“Kit Forrest! My God, it’s been a long time. I heard about you and Emerson.” Steph’s tone is dripping with cloying sympathy, but her eyes are curious. Damn it. “I’m so sorry. You guys were together for such a long time! Must have been hard. You think you know somebody, huh?”

“Yep,” Kit says, trying not to sound as weary as he feels. He’s had this conversation so many times in the last eighteen months that he wants to print his half on a business card and hand it to people instead. “Life sure does come at you fast, and you can’t cry over spilled milk, right?”

He says it like it’s a joke, and she laughs, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Kit can see that she’s disappointed when he changes the subject and launches into his proposal, that she’d been hoping to hear something more about what happened. He tries not to judge her too harshly for it, even as he remembers that what had started Maggie warring with her back in the day had something to do with gossip.

The whole thing throws him off-balance—he’d purposefully set this appointment outside of his own small town in hopes of getting a stranger—and so he stumbles through his presentation. Kit doesn’t sound quite convinced of his own plan, let alone convincing. This is a shame, because it’s a very simple proposal: Sawyer’s Books is a community icon, but it’s an old building that wasn’t intended to bear the weight of thousands of books for decades. Though it brings in a lot of foot traffic and generally turns a decent profit, the firehouse itself has significant structural damage that the city is increasingly less chill about with every passing day. Kit cannot afford to pay for the repairs all at once; he could, however, afford to pay back the cost of the repairs slowly, in installments, over time. One might call such an arrangement a loan, and one might get such a loan from a place with lots of money lying around, like Ithaca Federal Bank.

Granted, when Kit bought the building—which he had only been able to afford because of the structural issues—he’d expected Emerson to put up the repair money. Emerson had an enormous trust fund that wouldn’t bat an eyelash at those costs, and an investment account managed by his brother to boot, and he had spent years talking about how his dream was to run Sawyer’s. How many times had he told Kit he’d imagined himself as an old man behind the counter ever since he was a kid? Kit had thought he’d be ecstatic, and then that he’d quit his job and take over, the way he generally did. Then he, Kit, could go back to being a (more or less) mild-mannered second-grade teacher, if maybe one who occasionally pitched in at the shop on weekends.

Instead, he’d found he loved running the bookstore, and had quit his own job to have the time to keep it afloat.

Kit would probably make Steph’s whole week if he shared that little nugget of humiliating info with her. Instead, he does his best to ignore the way her expression of pity seems to be deepening with every word of his presentation. He wouldn’t say he succeeds, but he tries.

He’s not surprised when she stares down at his file when he’s done speaking, brows knitting, before she says, “Look, Kit. It’s a very well-presented proposal, but I don’t think it’s a fit. I’m sorry.”

He tried to brace for it, but this news still hits Kit like a physical blow. He’d be happier if she’d actually kicked him in the solar plexus, but he breathes through a wave of panicky nausea and forces a smile. He prepared for this. He can handle this. “Listen—I understand you have a lot of factors to consider here, and I appreciate where you’re coming from. It’s not that I don’t see that lending us the money has its risks. But sometimes risks are worth taking! Sawyer’s Books is⁠—”

“Hey, look. I know your store is important to the community.” Steph’s voice is so pitying now that Kit wishes the ground would open beneath his feet and swallow him whole. “And that life hasn’t exactly been fair to you. I mean, we all remember that accident when you were a kid—who could forget. And your last couple of years have obviously been… difficult. Plus⁠—”

“You’re good to stop any time,” Kit interrupts, trying not to sound like his teeth are gritted so hard they’re at risk of shattering. “I’m familiar with the list.”

“My point is, I’d be sorry to see you shut down. But I’m afraid that’s not a metric on which these sorts of decisions hinge. The facts of the matter are that the cost of the necessary repairs⁠—”

“That’s not my fault!” Kit throws this in with the desperation of a drowning man. “I knew there were issues when I bought it, but nobody flagged any of the really big problems for me during the inspection, and they definitely should’ve found some of them. I’ve taken it up with the city and even they agree it wasn’t⁠—”

“Be that as it may,” Steph interrupts, snapping Kit’s folder shut with an exasperated air, “the cost of the necessary repairs to the building exceeds your ability to pay. Those are the facts. The bank is not convinced that the situation would be any different when your loan payments came due, especially since you’d have to shut down operations while work was completed. I’m sorry.”

“So that’s it?” Somehow Kit can’t quite believe this. He’s spent weeks convincing himself that if he could get this meeting, and do a good enough job making his case, that he could save the bookstore. It was his shining beacon of hope, the thing that kept him moving forward. “Just no?”

“I’m sorry,” Steph says again, wincing. But when Kit doesn’t move, she stares at him, and then sighs. “Please, Kit—these things aren’t up to me, you know. Don’t make me say ‘Good day.’”

“Right,” Kit says blankly, standing up. “Of course not. It isn’t one.”

He shakes her hand. He leaves. What else can he do? It’s not like standing in the middle of her office weeping is going to change the facts. Anyway, it feels good to have something to do, even if that something is as simple as putting one foot in front of another.

Once he’s out on the streets of downtown Ithaca, the cool fall breeze whipping leaves into his shaggy red-brown hair, throwing the scarf back off his thin shoulders, and bouncing flecks of dirt off the already smudged lenses of his glasses, Kit decides he’s not quite done with putting one foot in front of another. That feels like about all he is capable of doing. So instead of returning directly to the bookstore, he drives to the other side of Cedar Falls and parks at the public library. Then he walks the twenty minutes back to work from there, along the wooded path that leads to the waterfall the town was named for.

At the overlook, Kit stops for a few minutes to catch his breath. It helps, the way it always has, to stand over the rushing water far below, look out at the canopy of the trees. Kit’s lived in Cedar Falls all his life, but the beauty of the place still takes his breath away. Just now, as mid-October invites even the last straggling trees to start changing their colors, it looks more like a scene from a storybook than the backdrop of a life as small and ordinary as Kit’s.

Then again, Kit can see Sawyer’s Books from here. Its redbrick arches peek up over the rest of the street, and the ivy crawling down the sides is bright green and beautiful, for all Kit knows it’s damaging the masonry. The shop, too, has always looked like a scene from a storybook, although he knows it’s about to be the backdrop for a series of miniature tragedies. He’s spent the whole walk home trying to think of a new plan, some way to scrounge up the money, and has come up with exactly nothing.

The guy from the city had been very clear: If they couldn’t at least get the ceiling fixed and the electrical issues solved by the end of November, Sawyer’s would be shut down for safety concerns. “Condemned,” actually, was the word the man had used, but Kit’s been trying not to think about it.

But he thinks about it now, as he looks at the beloved brick and stone building sitting like a slightly askew hat at the top of the town’s main drag, forever in the shadow of the Cedar Creek Falls. Whoever built Sawyer’s did so a little too close to the falls; it was a firehouse once, back in the days of bucket chains, and the people who’d conceived it had presumably wanted it close to a water source. Its placement is part of what’s caused the structural issues, but Kit can’t bring himself to wish it sat somewhere else. It looks correct where it is, like something half-seated in one of the fantasy novels customers can find inside, perched at the edge of the world.

Kit wonders if it’ll still look that way in a year, when it’s slipped from his fingers and been turned into, if he had to wager a guess, a TGI Friday’s.

He’s in a truly foul mood when he finally crosses the bookstore’s threshold, but he tries to paste on a smile for Allison, who is, these days, his second-in-command. It’s basically the two of them holding down the fort, and there’d been no way to keep from her what today’s meeting was about. Honestly, Kit probably wouldn’t have kept it from her anyway—he’d needed someone to work through his presentation with, and Allison has pulled a couple of late nights in the last few weeks obliging him.

It’s out of guilt for her wasted time that he pastes on the smile. Normally, he wouldn’t bother. She reminds him neatly why not when she takes one glance at his best effort to look cheerful, pushes her thick black hair back from her deceptively cherubic face, folds well-muscled arms across her chest, and sighs. “Yikes, okay. I’m guessing they didn’t say yes. And maybe also that they killed your dog?”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“Right,” Allison says, as though Kit’s being very slow. “Because they killed him? At your meeting? Keep up, Kit. It’s a terrible way for a bank to behave, really. You should sue.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Kit promises wearily as he drops his bag onto the front counter. After a moment’s thought he sprawls across it, too, letting his cheek rest against the cool, faded-blue linoleum. “Pencil it in for right after I finish dissolving into a fine mist, yeah? My non-existent dog can be avenged then.”

Her tone no longer joking, Allison mutters, “Woof. Was it that bad?”