THE LOST AND FOUND BOOKSHOP
Susan Wiggs

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

The News Building

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London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Susan Wiggs 2020

Cover design and illustration by Holly MacDonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Susan Wiggs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008358754

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008358761

Version: 2020-06-22

Dedication

For the booksellers, purveyors of dreams

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Three

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Four

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part Five

Chapter 22

Part Six

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Susan Wiggs

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
The Flood Mansion
San Francisco

Standing before the gathering at her mother’s memorial service, Natalie Harper glanced down at the podium. On the angled surface was a folder titled “Resources for the Grieving,” along with her notes. The guide was a compendium of advice, but there was one thing it failed to explain: How was she supposed to go on after this?

Natalie had been carrying the pages around for days, hoping she’d somehow find an explanation for the inexplicable, or a way to express the inexpressible. But all the notes and resources in the world failed to penetrate the unfinished narrative of her mother’s life, which seemed to dangle in the thin air of Natalie’s grief, just out of reach. The words shimmered in a wet blur before her eyes.

She tried to remember what she meant to say—as if she could sum up Blythe Harper’s life in a three-minute speech. What did you say at your mother’s final farewell? That she had been with you every minute of your life from the second you took your first breath until a week ago, when she had left forever. That she was beautiful and inspiring. Brilliant, but often foolish. Quirky and infuriating. Complicated and beloved. That she was everything—a mother, a daughter, a friend, a bookseller, a purveyor of dreams.

And that, at the moment Natalie had needed her most, Blythe Harper had fallen from the sky.

PART ONE

Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.

—TUCK EVERLASTING

1
Archangel, Sonoma County, California
One week earlier

This was a big moment for Natalie. The biggest in her career so far, for sure. The whole company had gathered in the reception hall of Pinnacle Fine Wines to celebrate her promotion and the million-dollar deal she’d made for the firm. But her own mother was a no-show.

True to form.

To be fair, the drive from the city up to Archangel could be unpredictable in the afternoon. It was equally possible that Blythe Harper had completely forgotten that she’d promised to show up to celebrate her daughter’s achievement.

Natalie pasted on a smile and smoothed her hands down the front of her blazer, a tailored, conservative piece she wore over the white silk pussy-bow blouse she’d splurged on for the occasion. Meanwhile, she tracked the company owner, Rupert Carnaby, as he made his way to the podium at the dais, pausing to greet colleagues along the way. Then she glanced at the door, half hoping her mom would come dashing through at the last minute.

The other half knew better.

Natalie reminded herself that she was a grown woman, not some kid who needed her mommy to show up for a school event. Not that Blythe had done that, either.

Although she didn’t consciously keep score, Natalie knew her mother had missed many things in her life, from her Brownie investiture ceremony to the California Mathletics championship to her graduation from college. There was always a reason—she couldn’t leave the shop, a sales rep was coming in, she couldn’t find a car to borrow, she had an event with a VIP author—all good reasons, the kind Natalie would feel petty for disputing.

Whatever, Natalie thought, shifting from foot to foot in her fashionable but uncomfortable midheel pumps. It’s fine. Her mom would have an excuse and Natalie would be fine with it. That was the way it always worked. And to be fair, her mother—who had raised Natalie alone—rarely had a moment to spare away from the bookstore. She’d run it almost single-handedly for the past thirty-three years, often lacking the wherewithal for backup help.

Mandy McDowell, Natalie’s coworker in logistics, milled past, a glass of wine in hand as she regaled a colleague with yet another story about her adorable but ill-behaved kids.

Too late, Natalie realized Mandy wasn’t watching where she was going. Natalie failed to step away in time, and Mandy’s glass of wine sloshed into her.

“Oh my God, Natalie,” Mandy exclaimed, her eyes wide with distress. “I didn’t see you there. Oh shoot, I am so, so sorry!”

Natalie plucked the white silk blouse away from her body. “Great,” she muttered, grabbing a napkin and blotting at the splash of red wine.

“Club soda to the rescue.” Mandy’s friend Cheryl bustled forward with a napkin and a bottle. “Here, let me help.”

While Natalie held her blouse away from her also-stained bra, Mandy and Cheryl dabbed at the large blot. “I’m such a horrible klutz,” Mandy said. “Can you ever forgive me? God, you shouldn’t. And today of all days, just as you’re about to go up to the podium …”

“It was an accident,” Natalie conceded, trying to keep her cool. Trying to minimize the situation.

“Promise you’ll send me the cleaning bill,” Mandy said. “And if the stain won’t come out, I’m totally buying you a new blouse.”

“Fair enough,” Natalie murmured. She knew her coworker wouldn’t make good on the promise. Mandy, a single mom, was perpetually broke. She always seemed to be scrambling to stay on top of her bills. Judging by her eyelash extensions and nail job, she didn’t mind splurging on self-care. Yet she was always short on cash.

Don’t judge, Natalie reminded herself. People have their reasons.

Mandy regarded her with dewy-eyed sympathy. “Oh hey, I thought your mom was coming up from the city today.”

Natalie gritted her teeth, then forced her jaw to relax. “Yeah, not sure what happened. Traffic, maybe. Or could be something came up at the bookstore. She always has a hard time getting away.”

“Are you sure you told her this whole party is in your honor?”

“She knows,” Natalie murmured. Mandy was so very sincere, but her questions were not helping.

“And what about Rick? Wouldn’t your boyfriend want to be here on your big day?”

“He had a test flight he couldn’t get out of,” Natalie said.

“Oh, that’s too bad. Guess he’s moving up the ranks at Aviation Innovations. When the two of us were dating, he never had a conflict if I had a big event on the calendar.” Mandy and Rick had dated before Natalie had moved to Archangel. They were still friends, a point Mandy liked to make with annoying frequency. Now she whipped out her phone. “Here, I’ll text him a picture so he’ll see what he’s missing.”

Leaving no time for objections, Mandy snapped a picture of Natalie’s unflattering, openmouthed expression, and she hit send before Natalie could stop her.

Thanks, she thought. And then: It’s not a big day. It’s a job, is all. She eyed her coworkers, snacking on amuse-bouches and refilling their wine goblets at the open bar. Not one of life’s peak experiences.

Just then, the rapid clinking of a glass drew everyone’s attention to the podium.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” said Rupert, leaning toward the mic and surveying the gathering with his trademark boyish grin. “And by good, I mean great. And by afternoon, I mean happy hour.”

A murmur of chuckles rippled through the crowd. “I wanted to take just a little time to celebrate today. Now, Natalie Harper needs no introduction because you all know her, but I’d like to say a few words. Natalie!” Rupert gestured. “Get your good self up here and join me.”

She felt a blush coming on as she buttoned her blazer, knowing the wine stain would still be visible above the lapels. Her chest was clammy and damp, redolent of old-vine zin.

“A brief history, if you’ll indulge me,” Rupert began. One of his favorite things was to wax on about the background of the family wine distribution business. “When my grandmother Clothilde put me in charge of Pinnacle, she said, ‘You have one job.’” He did a spot-on imitation of his grandmother’s French accent. “‘To bring wine to the world, and to be excellent.’ And the way to do that is to work only with excellent colleagues.” He stood aside and gestured for Natalie to step up. “My friends, Natalie Harper embodies that mandate. So today, I give you our new vice president of digital inventory.”

A subdued smattering of applause accompanied her to the podium. Rupert beamed, his veneered teeth gleaming. In a small, petty corner of her mind, Natalie believed he knew she’d been keeping him afloat while he glad-handed with suppliers and accounts and played golf on company time. That was probably the real reason for this promotion.

“Thank you,” she said awkwardly, unused to being in the limelight. Spoken aloud, the new job title sounded geeky, or perhaps even slightly made-up. That was the nature of the field she was in, she supposed. She had chosen this job for its stability and marketability. There would always be a place for someone who could manage information technology and logistics, because those were matters that 99 percent of people had zero interest in and couldn’t stand doing.

Managing inventory was not like being a diplomat, a deepsea diver, a winemaker, a bookseller—jobs people might actually enjoy. “I’m grateful for this opportunity,” she continued, “and I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish.”

Truth be told, she couldn’t stand the job, either, but that was not the point. The point was to have a steady career that would never let her down.

“Another bit of history,” Rupert said, winking at Natalie and taking the mic. “Once upon a time, this young lady came to me looking for a position here at the firm, and I, in my infinite wisdom, signed her up immediately.” He paused. “Now look at her—she’s got those puppy dog eyes, and the instincts of a barracuda, and probably more smarts than all of us combined. What she did with our inventory system was nothing short of a miracle. Thanks to Natalie taking the lead on this, we’ve had our biggest year ever here at Pinnacle.” He laughed. “Okay, yeah, I can see I’m boring you. So I will wrap this up with one final announcement. Governor Clements’s only daughter is getting married to the owner of Cast Iron.” Cast Iron, a group of wildly popular luxury restaurants, had been founded by a wildly popular internet star. His creative food and wine pairings were taking the foodie world by storm. “As you can imagine, it’s going to be the wedding of the year in our fair state.” Another pause. “What’s that got to do with us, you ask? Well, I’m going to have Natalie explain.”

She caught a whiff of herself as she took the mic. Spilled wine and nervous sweat. How lovely. “I’ll try to make a long story short. Pinnacle Wines now has an exclusive deal to supply the wine to Bitsy Clements’s wedding. And afterward, we’ll be the exclusive supplier to Cast Iron.”

Her words didn’t begin to convey the complicated and tense negotiations she had gone through. Natalie had driven her team to their limits, putting together the perfect combination of products and discount rates. The multimillion-dollar deal was nearly complete.

There was one more deadline to meet—the procurement of a rare Alsatian white wine the groom insisted on. Once that was confirmed, the details would be finalized. “I’d like to thank my team—Mandy, Cheryl, Dave, and Lana—for helping with the project.” That was a white lie, she privately conceded. The team had been an encumbrance every step of the way, requiring constant vigilance on her part.

“And with that, let’s all have a drink,” Rupert said, turning on the charm as he took over the mic again. He, too, had been challenging throughout the process. Though his intentions were good, he lacked the business and financial acumen needed to put together a complicated deal. He was happy enough to take credit, though, and decent enough to reward Natalie with a new position.

Glasses were raised. She gazed around the room at all the people talking and laughing, enjoying the view from the upper offices of the building.

With the promotion came a new office a good distance away from the cube farm where the inventory department resided. Now Natalie would have a corner space of her own. She had been eager to show it to her mother—a floor-to-ceiling window framing a forever view of the rolling Sonoma landscape, a refuge from the constant, unproductive chatter of her coworkers.

Rupert launched into more charming banter about the upcoming nuptials, which was already being compared, with hyperbolic enthusiasm, to a royal wedding. Natalie stepped down, took out her phone. Her daily affirmation flashed on the screen: I trust that I am on the right path.

She swiped it away and hit redial, but as expected, her mom’s phone went to voice mail: You’ve reached Blythe Harper of the Lost and Found Bookshop here in the heart of San Francisco’s historic district. Leave me a message. Better yet, come see me at the bookstore!

Natalie didn’t leave a message. Her mother rarely checked voice mail. Natalie sent a text—You didn’t miss much, just me getting red wine thrown on my shirt and being awkward at the mic.

Then she noticed a message awaiting her. She slipped out of the room, knowing no one would miss her. She had always been an under-the-radar type of person. She went down the hall, seeking the quiet of her new office. Most of her things were in boxes on the floor. She’d been hoping her mom would give her a hand organizing the place during her visit. Pausing at the window, she took a phone picture of the impressive view. Then she texted the photo to her mother. Even better in person, she wrote.

The voice mail was from Rick’s number. She cringed ever so slightly as she listened. Hey, babe, sorry to miss your big day, he’d said in his deep, friendly voice. Couldn’t get out of this test flight today. Looking forward to the weekend. Love you.

Did he? Did he love her? Did she love him?

A part of Natalie didn’t want to contemplate the answer, but if she was being completely honest with herself, she would have to concede that the spark had gone out for them a while ago.

On the surface, she and Rick seemed like the ideal couple—an ambitious wine executive and a busy aviation engineer and pilot. He was good-looking and came from a nice family. Yet one thin layer below the surface, there was a flat line of predictability. Sometimes she worried that the two of them were together simply because it was comfortable. If comfortable meant an unimaginative, unchallenging relationship.

It was possible that each was waiting for the other to end it.

She was stirred from her thoughts by the doorbell ding of an incoming email. It was probably a work-related matter that could wait until Monday, but she couldn’t not check her computer. And then she couldn’t not see the boldface subject line that nearly stopped her heart: Urgent: Licensing Deadline Missed.

What the hell?

She plunked down bonelessly in her ergonomic rolling office chair, feeling the blood drain from her face. The message was from Governor Clements’s executive social manager. Ms. Harper, I’m sorry to inform you that the licensing deadline from the Board of Equalization was missed and the agreement will be canceled pursuant to …

A silent scream built in Natalie’s chest. Missing an important deadline put the entire agreement at risk. How could this have happened?

In her gut, she knew. Mandy had been in charge of the filing. Natalie had drummed into her again and again that the hard deadline was crucial. Mandy had drummed back that she had it handled. Natalie had double-checked with her.

But she hadn’t triple-checked.

Holding in panic, she stabbed a number into the phone. This was the deal she had worked so hard to bring to fruition, competing fiercely with other suppliers for the wedding and franchise contracts.

If the deal fell through, Natalie would be faced with the decision about whether to protect Mandy from being fired. The woman made mistake after mistake, and typically, Natalie covered for her. Mandy was everyone’s favorite. Everyone’s pet. She was adorable, funny, charming, beloved.

Natalie practically strangled the phone in her hand as she contacted the state controller’s office and the district manager. It was a good thing her mother and Rick had skipped out after all. It would not be fun for them—or anyone—to see her scrambling to undo her coworker’s mistake.

A tense hour later, Natalie had rescued the situation. She was drenched in sweat and red wine and shaken to her core as she ducked into the bathroom. Somehow she had managed to save Mandy’s ass—again. It had taken a great deal of groveling and an extra $10,000 in discounts—which Natalie knew would be taken out of her bonus.

In the stall, she didn’t puke, but she had the dry heaves. She took off her blazer and blouse. Both likely ruined. She couldn’t stand to wear the blouse another second, so she shoved it into the trash. Then she buttoned the blazer over her wine-spotted bra.

She was about to exit the stall when she heard the sound of a door swishing open.

“… see her face when Rupert was droning on?” The voice came from someone entering the bathroom. Mandy’s voice.

Natalie froze. She stopped breathing.

“Yeah,” said someone else. Mandy’s friend Cheryl. “That’s her resting bitch face. Thank God we don’t have to look at that every day anymore.”

“Right?” Mandy chuckled. “Her so-called promotion is the best thing that ever happened to us.”

“You think?”

“That nice corner office? HR put her there so no one has to hear her constant nagging. She won’t be in our faces anymore. So really, her only interactions will be with a spreadsheet. Perfect. I thanked Rupert personally for getting her out of the pit. Sweet freedom!”

Natalie heard a snicker and the sound of a high five. Two hands clapping.

“Cheers to that and cheers to no more toxic bosses.”

One of them started humming “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” as they both entered the other stalls.

Now Natalie really felt like puking. Instead, she made no sound as she fled from the restroom, praying they didn’t know she’d heard.

2

A shower and a change of clothes helped a little, but Natalie still felt devastated by what she’d overheard. Devastated, yet on some level unsurprised. She would never deny that she was precise. Orderly. Exacting of both herself and others.

Looking around her modest apartment, she admitted to a penchant for neatness.

But did that make her a horrible person?

Finger-combing her dark, curly hair, which was possibly the only unruly thing about her, she thought about her clean, paid-for hybrid car, her tidy home, her secure little life … and—the tiniest voice inside her whispered—the emptiness.

She didn’t know what might fill it up. She had created the home she’d lacked as a child—predictable, simple, neat. The apartment, while pleasant enough, was missing some essential quality she couldn’t quite pinpoint. It was in a pink stucco building as small and sweet as a cupcake, furnished with the things she liked to surround herself with—comfy chairs and shelves crammed with books, and a soft bed for curling up to read.

It should have been the right fit. It should have felt like home, like the place she belonged. Yet despite the idyllic Sonoma setting, surrounded by vineyards and apple orchards, the emptiness yawned. It never felt quite like home.

Certainly, the job wasn’t helping, despite her hard work and dedication to Pinnacle. Most days, her career felt like a grind. Somewhere along the way, she’d grown to hate the work. That, combined with the depressing thought that she and Rick were coming to an end, rolled over her in a fresh swell of nausea.

Stop it, she lectured herself. The promotion had come with a hefty raise and equity in the company. If she stayed on this path, she’d be set for life. Growing up in the bookstore with her flighty mother at the helm, that sense of security, of equilibrium, had been lacking.

Most days, she reflected, trying to power through the nausea, that was reason enough to stick with her job at Pinnacle.

She finished dressing in crop pants, a striped jersey top, and canvas sneakers. Trying to shrug off the unsettled feeling, she checked her phone. Her mom still hadn’t answered the text. Rick was still apparently flying somewhere.

There was a message from her friend Tess, though, inviting her over. The one bright spot in an otherwise completely crappy day.

She jumped into her little hybrid hatchback and drove toward Tess’s place. On the way, she stopped to grab a jar of honey from a roadside stand. Jamie Westfall, the owner, was a beekeeper who had moved to the area a few years back, alone and pregnant. She wasn’t alone anymore, though. She now had a little boy named Ollie.

As Natalie selected a pint jar with its SAVE THE BEES label and stuck five dollars in the honor box, Ollie came outside. “Hiya, Miss Natalie,” he said.

“Hi, yourself. What’s up?”

Elaborate shrug. He was bashful in the most adorable way. “S’posed to be reading to my mom for homework.”

“How’s that going for you?”

Another shrug. His mother came out on the porch, a wisp of a girl in overalls and an embroidered peasant top. “He’s a good reader, but he’s super picky. He did love the last one you gave us—One Family.”

“Oh good, I’m glad you liked it. Wish that book had been around when I was your age, Ollie. Our family was just me and my mom and my grandpa, and it would have made me happy to read about all the different kinds of families. Not just families that had a mom, dad, kids, dog.” She counted them off on her fingers.

He tugged at his lower lip. “I like reading about dogs.”

“I’ll bring you a new book next time. There’s a good one called Smells Like Dog. Did I ever tell you my mom has a bookstore? I used to work there, and it gave me a superpower—picking out just the right book for just the right kid.”

“How come you don’t work there anymore?” asked Ollie.

“After the day I had, I’m asking myself that question,” Natalie admitted. “I’m heading over to visit Tess for some tea and sympathy.”

“I don’t like tea,” Ollie said. “What’s sympathy taste like?”

Natalie laughed and ruffled his hair, then got back in the car. “Like a melted marshmallow with chocolate sauce.”

“Maybe we’ll have that for dessert tonight,” Jamie said. They stood together on the porch and waved goodbye.

As she regarded Jamie and her child, Natalie couldn’t help but see how happy they were together. Every once in a while, she thought about kids and felt a tug of yearning. All in good time, she told herself.

She and Rick had once talked about kids. Correction: Rick had talked about kids. She’d listened. And doubted. They hadn’t brought it up again.

En route to Tess’s, other doubts crept in. Was Tess her friend, or had she taken Natalie in like a stray cat? After what she’d overheard at work, Natalie wasn’t so sure anymore. She wasn’t sure of anything.

Turning at the signs for Rossi Vineyards and Angel Creek Winery, she followed the long gravel lane. Like Natalie, Tess Delaney Rossi had been raised by a single mother and had been living in San Francisco before moving to Archangel. Yet unlike Natalie, Tess had settled in the small town to marry, following her heart, not a career.

Natalie parked in front of the rustic farmhouse where Tess lived with her husband, kids, stepkids, and two rescued dogs—an aging, pointy-nosed Italian greyhound and a hulking mutt that was part akita and part Wookiee, as far as anyone knew. The dogs were lolling deliberately in the middle of the walkway between the driveway and house.

Tess came out to greet her. She wore her red hair pulled back in a scarf and a grape-stained work apron tied over her clothes.

“Hey, Nat,” she called. “Thought you’d like to join us for happy hour.”

“Sounds heavenly. Thanks.”

“Dominic and the kids are all out back. Big harvest day for our little vineyard.” With a gesture, Tess led the way to a sunny spot beside a large shed. The harvest team unloaded the crates of just-picked grapes and dumped them on the long, stainless steel sorting table. At one end, the table vibrated, eliminating unripe or rotten grapes. At the opposite end, the grapes moved along a conveyor for destemming.

The family gathered around, sorting the grapes by hand, laughing and talking as the juice stained everything it touched.

She took in the sight of kids and dogs running around; Tess’s whistling husband; the older children helping Dominic with practiced skill. It all seemed so normal, a family having fun just being together.

“Hey, everybody,” she said.

“Hey, yourself,” said Dominic. “Welcome to Friday night at Angel Creek.”

Dominic Rossi was the type of husband who gave husbands a good name. The type of guy for whom the expression tall, dark, and handsome had been coined. The type of guy who exuded humor and heart along with a can-do attitude. He was the former president of the Bank of Archangel, but his passion was making wine.

And babies with his pretty wife, apparently. Natalie eyed Tess’s apron. Viewed from the side, the bump was impossible to miss. “Are you pregnant again?” she asked in a low voice.

Tess answered with a redhead’s classic blush and a grin of delight.

“She promised me a sister,” said Trini. Dominic’s daughter, now in high school, threw a glance at her brother Antonio, who had stepped away from the table to amuse Tess’s two sons by chasing them around with his grape-colored hands. The little boys, known as Thing One and Thing Two, responded with squeals of glee.

“That’s great,” Natalie said. “Congrats, you guys.”

The Rossis made the whole blended-family thing look easy. An illusion, Tess had assured her. Natalie knew it had been challenging to put together Dominic’s kids by his first marriage and the two he and Tess had had together. But there was no denying that in moments like this, they looked happy and secure. It was impossible to miss the undercurrent of passion Dominic and Tess shared.

“People say the third time’s the charm,” Trini pointed out. “Why do they say that?”

“Good question,” Natalie commented. “And does it imply the first two times are not charmed? Because when I look at those two little guys, I see something pretty special.”

As she spoke, Thing One plopped a fistful of discarded grape pulp on his brother’s head. The younger one howled with outrage.

Dominic’s sister, Gina, wiped her hands. “I got this, Tess.”

“Thanks.” Tess settled herself on a stool and looked at Natalie. “So … Where’s Rick tonight?”

“Not sure. He had a test flight late this afternoon.”

“You look like you had a tough day,” Tess observed.

Natalie didn’t bother denying it. “So I got this giant promotion at work …”

“Hey, that’s great,” said Tess. Something must have flickered in Natalie’s face, because she added, “Isn’t it?”

“It all seemed like a fine thing. The company had a little party, even, because I put together a big deal for them. My mom was supposed to come up from the city, but she never showed. Which is probably a good thing, because it turns out the whole promotion was a ruse to isolate me so I don’t have to work with anyone.”

“What?” Tess’s hands flew expertly through the grapes. “I don’t get it.”

Natalie sighed, staring at the ground. “I’m a toxic boss.”

“No way. You’re one of my favorite people.”

“You don’t have to work with me. Apparently I’m a nightmare. Micromanaging, control freak, see-you-next-Tuesday. According to the conversation I overheard in the restroom, I’ve checked all the boxes.”

“Oh, Natalie. That doesn’t sound like you at all. For what it’s worth, I’m guessing the trouble is with your coworkers, not with you. Someone who said what they said is objectively awful. I’m sorry you heard that, and I want you to know it’s not true.”

“Thanks,” Natalie said. “You’re probably right, but it was hard to hear. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of glad they moved me to a department where my only coworker is a flat-screen monitor.” She sighed. “My coworkers can’t stand me.”

“Well, we love you here at Angel Creek Winery, so roll up your sleeves and help out.” Tess tossed her a rubber apron.

“Putting me to work?”

“This time of year, everybody works.”

“I’m toxic, remember?” She gamely tied on the apron.

“Say goodbye to your manicure,” Tess warned. “The next one is on me.”

Natalie always had a flawless manicure. It was something she considered necessary to look professional at work. For all the good that did her. She dove into the destemming with both hands, turning her fingers the deep rich color of old-vine zinfandel.

They worked side by side for a while. The repetitive task and the chatter of Tess’s family helped a little. “What if they’re right?” Natalie mused aloud. “My work peeps, I mean. What if they’re right and I’m toxic, and no one can stand me?”

Tess didn’t say anything right away, but Natalie felt her hard, studying gaze. “What?” she asked finally.

“You need a drink.” Tess caught Dominic’s eye. “We’re taking a break,” she said, gesturing Natalie over to a stationary tub with a hose.

“Slacker,” said her husband with a grin.

Tess stuck out her tongue at him and turned away. “I’m a toxic boss, too, sometimes. They just don’t dare say anything.”

After they washed up, Tess poured a glass of zinfandel from a cask labeled Old Vine—Creek Slope. For herself, she opened a frosty bottle of Topo Chico, and they sat down on the terrace adjacent to the house. Shaded by a pergola, the stone-paved area was littered with kids’ toys and offered a commanding view of the vineyard. Beyond that lay the neighboring apple orchard, where Tess’s sister lived and ran a wine-country cooking school.

“Listen,” said Tess. “I used to be like you. I used to be you. I was a life-support system for a job, mad at the world without really knowing why.”

“What?” Natalie frowned, then looked around at the house—which literally had a white picket fence—and the kids and dogs. “No way.”

“Way. Do you know, I once ended up in the ER with a panic attack?”

“Seriously? Oh, Tess. I never knew that about you. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. Honestly, I was a hot mess. Thought I was having a heart attack.” She was quiet for a few minutes. Then she said, “It seems like long ago—a different life, back when I was single and living in the city, before all this happened.” She gestured to encompass the vineyards, the husband and family. “I was obsessed with my career. A career I was so, so good at.”

She used to work as a provenance expert for a high-end antiquities auction house—that much Natalie knew. In fact, Tess had helped Natalie’s mother in valuing some of the rare books at Lost and Found. “I’m pretty sure I drove people batty,” Tess admitted. “I know for sure I drove myself batty.”

“I can’t even picture that.”

“It happened. I survived. And I’m not trying to scare you. I’m not saying you’re dealing with anything like anxiety, but for me, lying in the ER, convinced I was dying, was a wake-up call.”

“I’m woke. Too woke, according to people at work.” She told Tess about Mandy’s habit of making mistakes, and her own constant vigilance and extra work to correct them.

“Let me get this straight,” said Tess. “This woman screws up on a daily basis, and you cover up for her. Not that you owe her anything, but why would you help her out all the time?”

“Because I’m her supervisor. And because I can.”

“Well, here’s a question for you: What would happen if you stopped covering for Mandy and let her fail? What then?”

“I’ve asked myself that many times,” Natalie admitted. “It would suck for the whole company. If I hadn’t fixed things just this afternoon, we would have lost the account and the firm’s reputation would suffer. So would mine, since I’m her supervisor. Eventually, she’d get fired. And she does need her job. She’s single, raising a couple of young kids.”

“And how is that your responsibility?” Tess asked.

“Because I—” Natalie paused. “It’s not.”

“So …?”

Natalie swirled the wine in her glass. Wine was such a beautiful thing, complex and rich and delicious. The whole company she worked for had been founded solely on the basis of this fine substance, bringing comfort and joy to those who knew how to savor it.

Yet for Natalie, there was no joy. Just a job. A steady, lucrative job with benefits. A pension plan. Everything her mom had done without all her life. “Not bailing Mandy out when I know exactly how to do it seems manipulative. I don’t want to be the agent of her downfall.”

“I get that, and I get where you’re coming from. We were both raised by single moms. Not a dad in sight. Did our moms fall down?”

Natalie thought about her mother, who had somehow managed to deal with financial struggles without collapsing utterly. Tess and her half sister, Isabel, had grown up without their father, who had gone missing before they were born.

Natalie, on the other hand, knew exactly where her father was. Though Blythe was fond of saying that life had given her everything she wanted, Natalie sometimes wondered if that was really true. Blythe was a bundle of contradictions. She would take any risk in business, but never with her heart.

“If you keep rescuing your coworker,” Tess went on, “she’ll never figure things out on her own. You’d be surprised by how much you can learn from failure.”

“It’s the gift that keeps on giving,” Natalie remarked.

“See, my point is, you’re not doing her any favors by constantly mopping up behind her. Saving a person takes away her power to learn and move forward.”

“How’d you get so smart about these things?” Natalie asked. “Pregnancy hormones?”

“Right.” Tess chuckled.

Natalie reminded herself to savor the deep, rich wine and the glorious colors of the gathering sunset. She had a good life. A good job. A good friend. “I have to say, you’re better than therapy. It’s been a crappy day. Not just work and my mom being a no-show.” She sighed again. “I don’t think Rick and I are going to make it.”

“You and Rick? You seem so great together. What happened?” asked Tess.

“Well, that’s part of the problem. Nothing really happened. Nothing at all. He’s a perfectly nice guy and—outside of work, I suppose—I’m a perfectly nice person. We’re compatible, but … I’m not sure compatible is enough. We’ve been together for almost a year, and things haven’t really progressed.”

“Oh, man. Do you want them to progress?”

Natalie gazed out at the sweeping landscape, vineyards and orchards, endless bounty. Rick sometimes took her flying to enjoy the scenery, and she loved it. She wanted to be able to say she loved him. “I want to be crazy about him. I should be crazy about him. He’s great-looking. Successful. Good enough in bed. Has a nice family down in Petaluma.”

“And yet …”

“Exactly. There’s a yet.” She studied the horizon, a gently undulating sine wave where the hills met the sky. “I wish there weren’t. I wish I could feel all in.” It was true. She craved some heady mixture of passion and certainty and excitement that didn’t feel threatening or risky.

Maybe that was the point, though. Maybe the very nature of excitement was risk.

In that case, she could do without the excitement. “Mom says I’m too closed off to intimacy,” she confessed. “She would know, of course. She’s been single all her life. And she claims she’s happy. So why does she think I need someone? Can’t I be happy too?”

“Of course you can. Your mom sounds like mine—a bundle of contradictions. Keeps things interesting. Ah, Nat. I’m sorry your mom couldn’t be bothered to show up, and I’m sorry you and Rick are at a low point. But your promotion is awesome and well deserved.” She paused. “You’re my friend and I love you so this is coming from a place of love. Do you think maybe you’re cranky because of the work?”

“Well, duh,” Natalie replied. “The work is … ah, just work. But I’m excellent at it. Much as I wish I could find something both steady and inspiring, I don’t think that exists for me.”

“Somewhere along the way, you’ve convinced yourself that feeling excitement is risky.”

“Growing up in a bookstore can do that to a person. I won’t deny it was fun—surrounded by all those books, the customers coming and going, the shipments of new titles every month—that was the fun part. But at some point, I realized Mom was drowning in debt, month in and month out.”

“And that scared you into going for a steady career with no surprises.”

Natalie nodded. “I can’t be fearless like my mom. Maybe she likes the roller coaster. She doesn’t mind being behind on the bills, because she’s always sure she’ll have a better day.”

The thought of living like that caused Natalie’s stomach to knot. “The only time I’ve seen her rattled is when my grandfather fell and broke his hip. Now he’s having something Mom calls ‘cognitive issues.’ I really wanted to see her tonight to hear more about that. Poor Grandy. Maybe that’s why Mom couldn’t come—something with Grandy.” She hugged herself, picturing the lovely man who had been the father she’d lacked, the nanny looking after her, the homework mentor and tutor, the adored playmate of her childhood.

“I had that falling grandfather,” said Tess.

“Old Magnus?” Natalie had met the elderly gentleman a time or two. Like Grandy, he was a fine old man. He had that soft-spoken affection that radiated from the best sort of grandfathers. “He had a fall?”

“Not recently. He fell off a ladder in the apple orchard years ago. It was a huge scare, but he got better.”

“I hope I can say the same about Grandy. Ever since he broke his hip, he hasn’t been the same. Maybe I’ll head down to the city tomorrow and pay him a visit.”

“I bet he’d love to see you.”

Natalie got up and carried their glasses to the patio bar. “And on that cheery note, I’ll let you get back to your family. I need to head home and spend some time figuring out what to do about the people who hate me.”

“Stop it.”

“I’ll try, Tess. I won’t let it get to me.”

As she drove back to town, Natalie repeated the words like a mantra. Don’t let it get to you.

The mantra didn’t work, so she switched on the car radio and sang along with Eddie Vedder while the sunset panorama of the countryside swished past. The song “Wishlist” had her compiling her own list of wishes. A different job. A different attitude. A different life.

“More on our breaking news story …” An announcer interrupted the next song.

Annoyed, she reached over to switch the station but stopped when she heard “Aviation Innovations.” That was Rick’s company.

“The FAA is investigating a crash of a small plane registered to Aviation Innovations in Lake Loma this afternoon,” the announcer said. “Both the pilot and passenger were apparently killed on impact. The names of the deceased are being withheld pending notification of the families.”

Natalie listened with gathering dread and a guilty sense of relief. It was Rick’s company, but the victim could not have been Rick. He was flying solo today, a test flight. She pulled off to the shoulder of the road and called him. No answer. Then she sent a quick text message to him. I just heard about the crash. I’m sorry. Anyone you knew?

There was no reply, so she continued driving. It had to be someone he knew. It was a small company, after all. She might even know the victim. She and Rick had socialized with some of the other pilots, going on wine-tasting flights and scenic tours. She found herself wondering if life with Rick was really so bad. He was steady. Predictable. Reliable. Everything she valued.

On impulse, she turned off the main road and drove to the Aviation Innovations headquarters. The parking lot was jammed with official vehicles and people rushing around. She looked for Rick in the crowd—a squeaky clean–cut all-American guy with big shoulders, a clipped haircut, and a nice smile.

She didn’t spot him amid the personnel swarming the main building and the hangars. Then she spied Miriam, his assistant, sitting on the front steps, talking on her phone.

Miriam looked up and saw Natalie. “I’ll call you back,” she said into her phone.

“Hey, I just heard,” Natalie said. “I came to see if Rick got back yet.”

Miriam took hold of the stair rail and drew herself up. “Natalie …” The woman’s face was as white as the puffy clouds sailing over the Sonoma hills.

Natalie stopped in her tracks. Dread dawned in stages—confusion and disbelief, then flat-out denial. “It wasn’t Rick,” she said. Her voice sounded harsh, almost mean. Probably how she sounded at work, come to think of it.

“Oh, Natalie. It’s terrible. Horrible. I’m so sorry. I can’t even …” Miriam reached for her hand. “Come sit.”

Natalie flinched and snatched her hand away. “I don’t need to sit. I need … I … I …” She had no idea what she needed in this surreal, unbearable moment. She took a gulp of air. “He said he was going to be gone for the day. Yeah. Said he wouldn’t make it to my party at work. He was on a test flight. Oh God, did he crash during the test? Did … did—”

“It … It wasn’t a test flight.”

“Then he’s okay?” Natalie was desperate for that to be true.

Panic glinted in Miriam’s eyes. She seemed to have trouble meeting Natalie’s gaze. Then she took a deep breath. “He, um … He had a passenger.”

“I heard that on the news, yes.” Natalie’s mind raced. Oh God. Rick.

His parents lived in Petaluma. He had a sister there, too. Natalie had met her just a few weeks back—Rita? No, Rhonda. “Should I go see his folks?” she asked Miriam. “Is someone with them now?” Her heart hammered furiously. Her hands were clammy, her lungs aching for air.

Rick was gone. How could he be gone? They had dinner plans tomorrow night at the French Laundry in Yountville. She’d been agonizing over the talk they needed to have about the fact that the relationship didn’t seem to be working. She had been wondering which one of them would step up and end things.

How could he be gone?

“Natalie, I really need you to sit.” Miriam put a hand on her shoulder and steered her to the blond limestone steps in front of the low, modern building. Her touch was firm, yet Natalie could feel her hands shaking.

“Yes, okay. I’m … I guess everybody’s in shock …” She noticed a few others casting glances her way, whispering.

“He had a passenger,” Miriam said again. “She died, too.”

“Oh. Well, that’s terrible.” Her mind was racing. Running away from something too awful to grasp. She. Another woman? Was Rick cheating?

Not anymore, she thought. And then hated herself for thinking it.

Miriam turned to her. Held both her hands in a firm grip. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to … oh God. The other passenger was your mother.”

Time stopped. Everything stopped—breath, heartbeat, the turning of the Earth, the wind through the trees, the swarm of approaching personnel. Natalie forced herself to listen to Miriam’s explanation, struggled to take in the words while at the same time feeling everything inside her rise up in furious denial. This couldn’t be happening, but as more people drew around her, she felt the devastating electric shock of certainty.

She stared at the woman who had just said her mother was dead, but she really couldn’t see anything through the blindness of shock. And then it came, a pain so excruciating that she was flash frozen in white numbness, shot through the heart.

3

Grandy.” Natalie spoke her grandfather’s name softly, with as much gentleness as she could muster. “It’s time to go.”

As she stepped through the door, Andrew Harper rose from his favorite wingback chair in his tiny apartment at the back of the bookstore. He could no longer navigate the stairs in the old building and had moved to the new space from the upstairs apartment where he’d lived nearly all his life. The small ground-floor studio had been reclaimed from a storage room. The hurried arrangement wasn’t ideal, but it spared her grandfather from having to leave his lifelong home. Though the space was cramped, there was a picture window with a view of the tiny rear garden, now bright with the last of the season’s hollyhocks and roses.

Curving a hand over the top of his cane, he turned to her. A sweet smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “Ah, there you are, Blythe. I’ve been waiting for you. How nice you look. Is that a new frock?”

Natalie’s heart swelled as she crossed the room to him. Grandy had always been an immovable fixture in her life. From earliest memory, he had been present, restoring old books in the basement or chatting up customers in the shop. In the evening, he read stories aloud to her while she snuggled up to him, breathing in his comfortable scent of shaving lotion. She had learned wisdom and kindness through his gentle example.

And now he needed her. In the past week, he had frequently mistaken Natalie for her mother. Maybe the grief was too enormous to bear, and his failing mind had embossed Natalie’s face with her mother’s features. Though several days had passed since the shattering news, there were many moments when he refused to accept that his daughter—his only child—was gone.

Now that Natalie was here, she could see how full her mom’s hands had been as Blythe tried to look after Grandy. Somehow, Natalie would have to take over his care. He insisted he could manage on his own, but she wasn’t so sure. There were appointments to be kept with his doctor and various specialists. Meds to be dispensed. Meals to be prepared. Housekeeping to be done. Looking around, she spied a half-dozen projects that would make the room nicer. A bright coat of paint. A bookcase within reach. Maybe do something about the hulking old radiator that reluctantly groaned to life in winter.

In the light from the garden window, her grandfather looked wonderful to her—tall and dignified, timelessly handsome in a tailored suit and crisp white shirt she’d stayed up late ironing the night before. She knew he wanted to look his best for the service. He tugged ineffectually at his necktie. “Help me with this, Blythe. I can’t … I don’t know how …” His words evaporated into a cloud of confusion.

“Let me help.” Standing in front of him, she looped the tie in a Windsor knot, something Grandy himself had taught her to do years before. The tie was vintage Hermès, a brilliant silk print in a sundial pattern. It was probably something her mother had found in a resale shop with her unerring nose for high-end fashion at low-end prices.

“It’s me, Natalie,” she said, her throat raw from crying. “Natalie. Your granddaughter.” It felt strange and horrible to have to explain who she was to a man who used to know her better than she knew herself.

“Of course,” he said agreeably. “You look just like your mother, only sometimes I think you’re even more beautiful. And my lovely daughter would be the first to agree with me.”

“Today is her memorial,” she reminded him, finishing the tie with a gentle tug. The idea was still too enormous to grasp. She felt as if she were swimming through a fog of grief and guilt, just trying to stay afloat. If only she hadn’t assumed her stupid company party had warranted a visit from her mother. If only she had been honest with Rick instead of waiting for him to conclude that their relationship had run its course. Instead, she had orchestrated the demise of her mother and a good man in his prime.

“There’s a car waiting out front.”

“A car …?”

“The memorial,” she said again. “That’s why we’re all dressed up.”

He touched his necktie and gave her a blank look.

“Mom died, Grandy. I came as soon as I found out, and I’ve been here all week.” After learning the stunning news at Rick’s office, Natalie had jolted herself into a strange, mechanical fugue, getting into her car and driving straight down to the city to be with her grandfather. Though she scarcely remembered the drive, she kept reliving the moment she’d had to tell him. His face had lit up when she’d come through the door, and for a few precious seconds, she’d let him delight in a visit from his granddaughter.

Then she’d said the words that still didn’t seem real—Mom died in a plane crash.

Grandy had been uncomprehending, just as Natalie had been. Blythe couldn’t be gone. How could she be gone? How could she be stolen from the world, just like that?

It had taken several explanations before the understanding and deep horror penetrated his denial. A crack opened up—an earthquake. A great, unbreachable fissure. She could hear his poor heart shatter into pieces.

They had wept together, torn to bits by their shared grief. Days later, she still felt the aftershocks of the emotional devastation.

Andrew’s memory issues made a terrible situation worse. He had begun losing bits of himself—short-term memory, fine motor control, rational thinking. The doctors characterized the dementia as a mild form. Intermittent. Early stage—the awful implication being that it would progress. Increasing memory loss, disinhibition, hallucinations. Natalie’s mother had said Grandy got scared and confused sometimes, and other times, he seemed like his old self. He’d lost weight and suffered from headaches, tremors, and fatigue, which the care team couldn’t explain.

Natalie had not been prepared for how hard it was turning out to be. It made the current situation a fresh horror to him every time he forgot his daughter had been killed and had to be reminded. Did he feel the same wave of shock and grief all over again? Did he have to keep feeling that fresh pain? She couldn’t imagine having to experience the initial overwhelming stab of that first detonation of news, again and again.

Andrew took a breath. His face didn’t change. He scarcely moved. But his dark eyes reflected such an inexpressible sadness that Natalie flinched. “I know,” she whispered, taking his hand and leading him to the door. “It hurts all the time. Every waking moment.”

“Yes,” he said. “The pain is a reflection of how much we loved her.”

“You’ve always had a way with words.”

“Blythe said it runs in the family. She’s been reading Colleen’s journals.”

“Colleen. You mean your ancestor, the one who died in the 1906 earthquake?”

“The grandmother I never knew. My dear father was just seven years old when he lost her and was sent to an orphanage. He rarely spoke of that day, but I believe it haunted him all his life.”

Lately, Grandy had clearer memories of the distant past than he did of events that occurred five minutes ago. “I didn’t know about Colleen’s journals.”

“Blythe found them not long ago. I don’t know what she’s done with them.”

It was possible that the journals were a figment of Grandy’s imagination, since all they knew of Colleen O’Rourke Harper was that she’d immigrated from Ireland, had one son—Grandy’s father, Julius—and disappeared when the earthquake struck. The family history had been altered forever by a mysterious twist of fate.

Was that what happened to you and Rick, Mom? Natalie wondered. A twist of fate? Or had Natalie herself orchestrated it when she’d invited her mother to the company party? Every day, she wished she could snatch back that moment.

She paused at the hall tree by the door as her grandfather went through his familiar going-out routine. First, the soft, wispy neck cloth. Then the overcoat, the black fedora, and finally the cane. No umbrella needed today. It was foggy and damp but not raining. The bright yellow leaves of early autumn were decoupaged against the pavement.

He held the door for her and she stepped through. “Do you want the wheelchair?” she asked.

He hesitated, looking down at the chair, his face creased with pain. “No,” he said. “I’ll walk into my daughter’s memorial and stand to speak at the podium.”

The dignified response tore at her heart as she slowly led the way down the narrow hall, past a storage room stacked with books, through the back office, and then into the bookstore showroom.

When she was a girl, Natalie used to start each day by skipping through the shop, calling good morning to her favorites as she passed them—Angelina Ballerina, Charlotte and Ramona, Lilly and her purple plastic purse. Then she would let herself out to catch the bus to school. Now a big portion of the shop was littered inside and out with tributes and notes of sympathy from the many people who had known her mother.

The front door was hung with a Closed sign and a printed announcement of the memorial. A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF BLYTHE HARPER.

Why was it called that when the last thing a grieving daughter wanted was a celebration?

She opened the door and cleared a path through the piled tokens that had been spontaneously left there—bouquets of flowers, dogeared novels and memorabilia, candles and handmade sketches and cards. The Lost and Found Bookshop had been a fixture on Perdita Street for as long as Natalie had been alive, and the sudden demise of its owner had inspired a huge, loving, and immensely sad reaction.

One thing Natalie had never wondered about until now: After the explosion of tributes, then what? Who picked up the wilted flowers, the rain-soaked poems, the blurred photos, the jarred candles?

The waiting black car smelled of canned deodorizer. The driver helped her grandfather into the back seat. Traffic was heavy even on a Saturday morning, and the drive to the Flood Mansion crawled along through wispy snakes of fog, past trees twisted and shaped by the wind, and along the slanting rooflines of the city’s Victorian Painted Ladies. Ringing cable cars lurched past bustling cafés and shops. As they wended their way upward, they broke through the fog and entered another microclimate, a sky of eye-smarting clarity that illuminated the city’s most splendid panoramas.

This had been Blythe Harper’s city, this peninsula crowned by forty-three “official” hills and surrounded by water, a place she swore she’d never leave. Yet she had left it, never to return, and now Natalie and Andrew had to scramble through the dark maze of unexpected grief.

“She told me she would be back on Friday night,” said Grandy, his eyes once again misted with confusion.

“That was her plan,” Natalie acknowledged.

“What the devil happened?”

Her mouth went dry. She said nothing.

“Natty-girl,” he said, using her nickname, “I know I’m forgetful, but I deserve to hear the truth.”

She nodded. She’d already told him. He needed her to go through it again. “I’m sorry, Grandy. It’s hard for me to talk about, because I feel as if I caused it. I wanted Mom to come up for some stupid company thing. I didn’t realize she and Rick were planning to surprise me by showing up together. He told me he had a test flight, but that was just a ruse. Instead, he flew down here and picked her up at Pier Thirty-Nine. They would have landed at the Archangel airstrip at around three that afternoon. But something went wrong during the flight.”

“Your Rick is an expert pilot.”

She folded her hands together and squeezed until it hurt. “He was. Oh, Grandy.” She remembered the fleeting thought she’d had that the female passenger in his plane had been someone he was cheating with. What a horrible thing to think about a man who was only trying to make her happy.

The memorial for Rick had taken place in Petaluma the day before. Natalie had dragged herself there, enduring a virtual gauntlet of headshaking and consoling friends and acquaintances. Every tribute and eulogy had attested to his expertise, his professionalism.

“If he was such an expert, then how could he have crashed?” Grandy wondered.

“The NTSB is still investigating,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t need to explain the details yet again.

She had culled through the preliminary reports, as if knowing exactly what had gone wrong would make the tragedy less cataclysmic. According to the report, the amphibious light sport aircraft was flying too low and—probably due to fog—mistakenly entered a canyon surrounded by steep terrain. Investigators postulated that the pilot thought he was in a different canyon that led to the larger, open portion of the lake. Right before the crash, a local man who was fishing in a boat spotted the plane about fifty feet over the water.

“As the plane swooped low, I waved to the pilot and he waved back,” the witness had said. “Everything seemed normal. I figured they were just buzzing over the lake or coming in to land on the water. A few seconds later, I heard the engines rev up and accelerate hard. Guess he was trying to turn.”

Once Rick realized there was no exit from the canyon, he attempted a 180-degree turn to escape. Based upon performance limits, the airplane would not have been able to climb past the steeply rising terrain.

The plane flew behind a point and then the man heard a loud crash. He sped in his boat to find the site. Approaching a cove, he spotted the wreckage and yelled out, but there was no response. He called 911.

Officials from the sheriff’s office, the Federal Aviation Administration, and rescuers from Cal Fire and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were led to the crash site. They speculated that the marine layer had caused Rick to mistake one canyon for another. By the time he figured out his orientation, there wasn’t enough space to pull up.

Natalie shuddered, haunted by the image. Over and over, she pictured those final seconds, imagining what her mother must have been feeling—the flash of realization, the panic, the terror. She told her grandfather what she’d learned but didn’t share the further details in the report. The blood. The motionless bodies found by the fisherman.

“They were both gone on impact,” she told Grandy.

He reached over and covered her hand with his. “I never met your Rick in person. I wish I had.”

He was never my Rick, thought Natalie. “At the memorial yesterday, his sister gave me something,” she blurted out.

“What’s that?”

She reached into her handbag. “This was zipped into a pocket of his flight vest.” She handed the small box to her grandfather.

“A diamond ring,” he said, taking it in a hand unsteady with tremors.

“Rick was going to surprise me with a marriage proposal,” Natalie said. “I assume he wanted my mom there when he asked me.”

“Yes, that was his plan,” Grandy said. “When we spoke on the phone—”

“You spoke with him?” Natalie felt nauseated.

“Indeed I did. He told me what he intended to do. He wasn’t exactly asking my permission, but he wanted me to know that he loved you. He wanted to make a life with you.”

Her throat clogged with inexpressible grief. Then she choked out, “He told you and Mom? You knew?” Surely not. Maybe this was one of Grandy’s episodes—delirium was the doctor’s term for it.

“Rick had a lovely plan,” Grandy continued. “He was going to ask you to marry him, and then fly you and your mother back to the city. He had a suite booked for the two of you at the Four Seasons on Nob Hill. It made me supremely happy to know such a fine young man wanted to marry you. I never dreamed it would go so wrong.” His hands shook as he straightened his tie. “Blythe never found anyone, and she always feared it would be the same for you. She believed Rick would be the one.”

Natalie put the ring away. “When I told her I was having doubts, she didn’t want to hear it. I don’t know what to do, Grandy. What should I do?”

He regarded her blankly. This was one of his lost moments. She was beginning to recognize the signs—the distant stare, the agitated hand movements, the impenetrable expression.

Realizing she was truly on her own with this, she gazed out the car window. While Rick had been plotting a surprise proposal and a romantic getaway, she had been contemplating the most civil, low-key way to break up with him. The very moment he’d been flying with her mother, a gorgeous engagement ring tucked into his vest, Natalie had been imagining life without him.

She kept expecting him to be the first to call it quits. Instead, he was buying a diamond ring, secretly plotting a marriage proposal and a whisk-you-away couple’s weekend. Marriage.

It would have been a surprise, all right. In the most terrible way. How could she have read the situation so wrong?

Attending his memorial had been painful and teeth-grittingly awkward. His family was made up of very nice people who had assumed Natalie, too, was very nice. She wasn’t nice. Couldn’t they see that? She felt especially not-nice when Mandy appeared at the service, her expressions of sympathy as hollow as Natalie’s heart.

His sister had handed her the ring box. “He loved you so much. He would have wanted you to have this.”

Natalie hadn’t dared to touch the ring, nestled on its bed of velvet. “Please. I couldn’t.”

“I realize you’re emotional now. You’re not thinking straight.” Rhonda had dropped the box into Natalie’s purse. “You don’t ever have to wear it. Or you could repurpose it, maybe have it made into something else. Or sell it and use the proceeds for something you care about. Rick would’ve liked that.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” Natalie had said.

“Nothing about this whole situation seems right.” Rhonda’s voice caught on a sob and she gave Natalie a brief hug. “I’m sorry we never got the chance to be sisters.”

Natalie felt like a monster.

She was a monster.

The town car drew up at the mansion, a sumptuous crown atop a hill overlooking majestic views of the Bay Area—the bay itself, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the hills of Marin County.

“This building has a romantic story,” Grandy said, seeming to snap out of his silence. “After the great earthquake, Maud Flood was so afraid of fire that her husband built her a grand house of marble atop this granite hill. He wanted to give her a new place made entirely of stone, so she would feel safe.”

“Now that,” Natalie said, “is a good husband.” Rick would have made a good husband, she thought, immersing herself again in guilt. He had been caring, and cautious, and he knew how to look after things. He was steady and stable, her two favorite qualities not only in people but in life itself.

A pair of white-gloved attendants held the door for her and Grandy. Someone in the foyer took their coats and Grandy’s hat to the cloakroom. A beautifully rendered poster on an easel welcomed guests to the celebration.

Bryan Ferry’s voice crooning “Avalon” drifted from unseen speakers. Mom had loved Roxy Music. On a sleepless night a few days before, Natalie had put together a playlist from Blythe’s digital music library.

Natalie nearly stumbled as they passed the gallery of enlarged photos on display in the rotunda. The grief was like a punch to the gut. Breath-stealing agony made her want to crawl out of her skin. Her knees would have given out if not for her grandfather. Though he moved slowly and leaned on the cane, he was strong. With her careless father so notoriously absent, Grandy had been the key man in Natalie’s life, a fact she was grateful for every single day.

She, Grandy, and the staff and friends of the bookstore had collected pictures of her mother, raiding old albums and digital files and sending them to a gallery that specialized in large-scale renderings and displays. The result was a beautiful frieze of images that captured Blythe’s energy and beauty and spirit.

There she was, a girl in the seventies, picking berries on a farm somewhere. A young woman proudly posing in her cap and gown in Berkeley blue and California gold. An impossibly young mother, surrounded by gauzy light through a window, holding her infant daughter in her arms, her expression a mixture of pride and terror. A woman standing with her cat at the grand open doorway of the Lost and Found Bookshop, in all her glorious vivacity. A soft-eyed daughter sweetly hugging her aging father.

The final portrait was Natalie’s favorite picture of her mother. No one knew who had taken the photo of Blythe standing on the beach at Fort Funston at the southwest edge of the city, gazing off into the distance, her expression enigmatic. To Natalie, beneath the joyous spirit everyone had loved, Blythe had always seemed just a bit sad. Sometimes, growing up, Natalie had been struck by the thought that she didn’t really know her mother. And now it was too late.

Even more moving than the photo gallery was the size of the crowd. As Natalie accompanied her grandfather to their seats in the front, he said, “I always pictured walking my daughter down the aisle at her wedding, not her funeral.”

She nearly stumbled when she heard those words. Only her determination to support him kept her steady. The assemblage was packed to the walls already, and more people were still streaming in. A velvet rope hung across a section in the front, demarcating a few seats with a card that read Reserved for Family.

In the strictest sense, they only needed two seats—one for her and one for Grandy. Blythe’s mother was long gone. Lavinia had gone away when Blythe was a baby, leaving disaster and scandal in her wake. As for Natalie’s father, Dean Fogarty, he likely had heard about the memorial, but he was as much of a no-show today as he had been for Natalie’s entire life.

Her family had consisted of the three of them. And now, all of a sudden, there were two. Natalie and Grandy. And her grandfather seemed to be leaving her in small, heartbreaking pieces.

She recognized many of the attendees—her mom’s friends, customers who had frequented the shop over the years, even salespeople from New York, publishers and colleagues in the book industry—people who had depended on her taste and opinions. There were authors whose books had graced her shelves, local merchants and neighbors from the tree-shaded enclave of Perdita Street.

Guests on both sides of the aisle offered tentative waves, mouthed expressions of sympathy and hand-over-the-heart gestures.

No one knew what to say to people facing a grief so big and shocking. Natalie wouldn’t know, either. She had a hard time meeting their eyes, feeling irrational shame, or perhaps guilt.

She and Grandy took their seats facing the podium, festooned with sweet-smelling native lilies and autumn mums from the Bonner Flower Farm up in Glenmuir, organic and sustainable, the way Blythe would have wanted. A swag of Buddhist prayer flags hung overhead. Her mother had never subscribed to a particular dogma, claiming organized religion was the cause of too much violence and strife in the world. But she often spoke of her favorite spiritual books, including Buddhism’s The Noble Eightfold Path, and admitted happily that she was drawn to the all-loving and nonviolent tenets of Buddhism.

The smooth-sided urn was overshadowed by another portrait of Blythe Harper, this one larger than all the rest in the gallery. Natalie had chosen it herself. Blythe was in her favorite spot in the bookstore—a cushy chair littered with throw pillows, angled near the lace curtain of the shop’s front display window. The natural light, filtered through the antique lace, illuminated the fine features of her mother’s face, framed by wispy dark curls, smiling lips, and eyes that were bright with ideas. The book in her lap was a poetry collection of Mary Oliver, which most people knew was a favorite of Blythe’s. The caption under the photo was a line from a well-known poem: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Natalie had chosen the quote, too. She settled back and tried to focus on the display. The images blurred together like a ruined watercolor. She checked her bag, touching the folder with her eulogy notes. There was no way to express this terrible goodbye, but she’d scraped her soul to find the right words.

Grandy leaned his cane on the seat back and stared straight ahead.

Natalie tucked her arm around his and wondered when she would stop feeling like she was on the verge of tears. “How are you doing?”

“I’m maintaining calm,” he said simply.

His lifelong friend, Charlie Wong, in a fine black jacket with a Nehru collar, arrived and sat down next to Grandy. A talented diorama artist, Charlie had known Andrew when both were young boys running around the city. Many years ago, Charlie had created an art piece based on the bookstore building, which was then Grandy’s typewriter shop. Now the two old men got together several times a week, going to dinner at one of Charlie’s daughters’ homes or attending game night at the local senior center. Charlie’s usual smile was in place, yet dimmed by the sadness in his eyes.

Tess and Dominic slid into the row behind Natalie. Tess leaned forward and gave her shoulder a squeeze. Natalie acknowledged the touch with a pat of her hand.

Cleo and Bertie, who both worked in the bookstore, arrived and took their seats on Natalie’s other side.

“Hi, guys,” she whispered. “Thanks for being here.”

“How are you holding up?” asked Bertie. “Sorry for speaking in clichés, but I really want to know, sweetie.” An aspiring actor, he was lithe and graceful, his whole body expressing feelings without words—in the angle of his head, the slant of his shoulders. Bertie was smart and funny and melancholy, chasing his dream of starring in a major theater production. He’d loved her mother, who had encouraged his acting career by giving him time off for auditions and rehearsals whenever he needed it.

“Grandy and I are keeping each other company,” Natalie said. “Honestly, I’ve never had my heart ripped out of my chest. But I imagine this is what it feels like.”

Cleo’s eyes were as dim as twilight, gleaming with a mist of sadness. She nodded and dabbed at her cheeks with a tissue. “Damn. You remind me so much of her.”

“Do I?”

Bertie leaned forward. “Hell, yeah. In the best possible way.”

Cleo was Natalie’s age, and had grown up in the neighborhood. The girls used to play together in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by Chinese grannies sipping their milk tea and playing board games. They’d snack on soft buns filled with sweet coconut, and when it rained, they’d duck into the curio shops or the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, their senses dazzled by the delicious, sugary aroma.

Cleo was Blythe’s second-in-command, helping manage the shop and, in her downtime, writing plays.

Frieda Mills, Blythe’s longtime friend, had volunteered to officiate the service. Now she stepped up to the podium. Her defiantly unkempt hair, threaded with gray, formed a nimbus around her small, drawn face.

The music subsided as Frieda adjusted her mic. “Good morning and welcome,” she said. “On behalf of Natalie and Andrew Harper, I want to thank you for coming.”

She gazed out at the crowd. “I’ve known Blythe since we were freshmen in college. She was the roommate I dreaded having—messy and talkative, better looking than me, never on time, constantly in motion, cluttering every space she inhabited.” She said this with a smile, and the smile trembled as she paused and took a deep breath. “In spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, I loved her like a sister. We celebrated holidays together, raised our kids together …”

Frieda’s two boys had each, on occasion, asked Natalie to dances and parties. She—and probably the boys as well—suspected they were being nudged together by their mothers.

“And then there were the books,” Frieda said. “Even in college, she had so many books that we used them for furniture—step stools, benches, nightstands, shelves for other books …”

Natalie could so easily picture that. When she was very small, her mother used to tell her that books were alive in a special way. Between the covers, characters were living their lives, enacting their dramas, falling in and out of love, finding trouble, working out their problems. Even sitting closed on a shelf, a book had a life of its own. When someone opened the book, that was when the magic happened.

“My friend Blythe often said her life was a grand adventure,” Frieda continued. “Books were her passion, so I wanted to share one of her favorites.” She put on a pair of wire-rimmed reading glasses and opened a well-worn copy of Charlotte’s Web.

The passage from the classic novel was filled with lovely prose that took on new poignancy and concluded with Charlotte’s famous words: “After all, what’s a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.”

Natalie had heard the reading many times, but now she clung to Charlotte’s wisdom, hoping with all her heart that her mother had left with that same calm, matter-of-fact acceptance. Haunted by images of those last moments, Natalie reflected that this did not seem possible given the way Blythe had died.

Other speakers reminisced about her mother. In cracked voices, they recounted memories of browsing the stacks with the well-read bookseller, or relaxing in the tiny café and basking in the sense of community Blythe cultivated. The tributes were lavish and heartfelt, a clear indication of the many lives she had touched. Through her shock and grief, Natalie felt a sad glimmer of understanding of why her mother had been so devoted to the shop.

The readings and tributes were followed by a song, and they were all invited to join in. The lyrics were printed in the program. “No Rain” by Blind Melon had been a favorite of Blythe’s, expressing the glory of escaping into the pages of a book. The woman playing guitar was a frequent patron of the shop. She had contacted Natalie and Frieda as they were organizing the program and asked to perform in Blythe’s honor.

As the lyrics of the song came out of Natalie on a shaky breath, she wished she could do exactly as the words expressed—Escape, escape, escape.

Andrew Harper felt the soft caress of the music on his face as he waited. Waited for what?

His mind darted away in search of the answer. It was a slippery process, like trying to catch polliwogs in the pond shallows in springtime. He glanced over at the young woman sitting beside him. She had pale skin and dark curly hair, and a face so beautiful and so sad it cracked his heart in two.

Now that he was old and plagued by strange fugues of forgetfulness, Andrew was learning to pay attention to certain details he used to filter out—sounds and smells, colors and fleeting images. Focusing on one thing—the timbre of a voice, the narrative on a page in a book—was increasingly difficult and disturbing. Walking out onto the street was like entering an amphitheater into an overwhelming and deafening cacophony of confusion.

He shored up his thoughts. He had to teach himself to think in a different way.

Although he knew Dr. Yang would disapprove, he had skipped taking his tablets this morning. Supposedly the pills were keeping him from feeling anxious. Perhaps that was indeed the case, but he needed a clear head to face the day, and the meds made him drowsy. He must not face this day in a state of drowsiness.

It was an important day. He couldn’t remember why.

He felt the sad young woman watching him through eyes bruised by grief. He looked down at the printed program card in his hand. It was beautiful, the thick stock imprinted by the letterpress machine in the basement of the bookshop. After he’d closed down his typewriter repair business and founded the bookstore with Blythe, no one had wanted to move the heavy machine, so they kept it and occasionally used it for special printings—a birth announcement when Natalie was born, the grand opening of the bookstore three decades ago, a gallery showing for Charlie Wong. Andrew used to tell Blythe he was getting old while waiting to print an announcement that she was finally getting married.

That always made her laugh and say he’d raised the bar too high; she would never find a man who could measure up to him. After what had happened with the fellow who had fathered Natalie, Andrew was glad she could laugh at all.

Then, in a blink, the situation came clear to him. The young woman beside him was Natalie, his granddaughter, Natalie. Her regard felt like a whir of moth wings against his cheek, powdering his skin with a residue like May Lin’s dusting powder, back when she had lived with him and they were happy.

He summoned a smile for Blythe. No, not Blythe. Natalie. Blythe was gone, suddenly and irretrievably, like a zephyr shooting into the night sky, leaving a trail of moonlit particles that swirled in brief, unspeakable beauty, and then faded into nothing.

The very sweet pop song was one he’d heard on Blythe’s radio many times, so he knew when the melody was winding down. He took out his handkerchief again and checked on Natalie, the silent sadness beside him.

His granddaughter’s face was a portrait of everything they were both feeling. Her eyes mirrored his pain. The shock and grief of losing Blythe were so deep and intense that it felt as if a new and devastating emotion had been invented just for them.

Natalie noticed his attention and tucked her hand inside his. Leaning over, she whispered, “Are you doing all right?”

No, he thought. A man is not meant to outlive his daughter.

“Yes,” he whispered back, the lie hissing through his teeth.

“If you don’t want to speak … if it’s too much for you—”

He squeezed her hand. “I know what I want to say. I’ll get through it.”

“You’re incredible, Grandy. I’m so glad I have you.”

“And I you.” He sat still as the officiant did another reading. He tried to think about what he wanted to say. What he needed to say.

How did one honor a woman’s life in a five-minute speech?

He had suffered losses through the years, certainly, as anyone his age had. Long ago, Lavinia had walked away from him and into the arms of a man who promised her something better. May Lin had come back into his life briefly at the end, bringing latent joy that was all the sweeter for having been delayed, and she had died in his arms last year.

Maybe that was the start of his decline. Dr. Yang called it a decline. A gradual slide down a hill into a pile of nothingness.

Andrew could not pinpoint the precise moment his memories had begun to slip and his thoughts turned to a jumble. Sometime after the hip debacle, he supposed. Before then, and even during his stay in the hospital and rehab, everything had been clear to him.

Then, once he’d finished with the rehab and returned to Perdita Street, Blythe had moved his living quarters to the main floor. Stairs were out of the question now. The room by the garden used to be a storage area for his father’s apothecary infusions, medicines, and herbs. Later, Andrew had cluttered the space with the tools of his own trade—Stoddard solvent, brushes, tiny pincers and lubricants and cleansers for repairing typewriters.

As he’d settled into his new quarters, which were not unpleasant, the fog had closed in, bit by bit. Fatigue dragged at him, and his stomach was upset by everything he ate. Food tasted like metal. His days started to fade, and his life turned as thin as lukewarm water. He was a ghost in a world that appeared through a glass that was ash-colored and wavy.

At some point he’d lost the proud man who used to swagger around the neighborhood, a regular cock of the walk. These days, he wandered, seeking a way out, and then he asked himself—out of what? He wanted to go home. Then he would remember that he was home.

He was Odysseus one moment, the Ancient Mariner the next, an ordinary man like Tom Joad or a seeker like Douglas Adams’s hitchhiker. He wandered in search of a past that existed only inside himself. He sought fields of flowers and towering cliffs that jutted out over the ocean and mountaintops that pierced the clouds.

Maybe he wandered because he had spent his entire life in one place—the shop on Perdita Street. He used to live upstairs, first with his parents when he was a boy. Then with Lavinia, the wife who had betrayed him. Then with Blythe, whom he had raised with no help from Lavinia. And now he was obliged to bury his daughter with no help from anyone at all.

The reading concluded and soft music trailed from hidden speakers. And then it was Andrew’s turn. With Natalie at his side and his cane in hand, he made his way to the podium. He turned slightly, letting his granddaughter know he was all right standing on his own. Then he set aside the cane. The least he could do was stand for his daughter.

Then he took off his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. He didn’t need to look at any prompts. Notes were not necessary when speaking from the heart.

“On the day she was born, my beautiful daughter, Blythe, became a part of my life’s journey, and we followed our common path until … until … the unthinkable happened. So let us not dwell on the way she died. Let us celebrate the way she lived.” He had to pause, then, as despair took his breath away. Recalibrate. Speak of Blythe, who could no longer speak. “What can I tell you about my child who died?”

He heard a few gasping sobs. “I can tell you that she had a happy life. I can tell you that her life was too short and mine is too long. At my age,” he explained, “I thought I knew what grief is. In all my years, I have known loss—my parents, dear friends, the woman I loved. But until the day my daughter was taken from me, I had no idea that grief could cut so deep or feel so painful.”

He paused, hearing Natalie’s soft, broken breaths. “And that is all I shall say about my feelings, because today is not about me. It’s about my daughter, Blythe Harper. On the day she was born, she changed my life. And the day she departed, she left an indelible mark on us all. And in between, she led a remarkable life.”

4

Andrew Harper’s wife left him on a Monday. He would always remember it was a Monday, because that was the day May Lin delivered the finished laundry, crisply folded and wrapped in a paper parcel. Then she would pick up the week’s bag, marked Harper and tagged with Chinese characters.

The bag of soiled items was considerably smaller without Lavinia’s clothing. She had packed everything in a battered steamer trunk she’d made him drag up from the basement. The trunk was a mysterious family heirloom that had once belonged to Colleen O’Rourke, the grandmother he’d never known. Colleen had migrated from Ireland in the 1880s, arriving at the age of fifteen. She had found work as a maid in the very building that was now the bookstore, somehow making her way in the world alone.

Now her trunk would be traveling with the gloriously beautiful Lavinia, not on a steamer but on a train to Los Angeles, where her rich lover had promised to give her the life she always claimed she deserved.

Her farewell to Andrew and Blythe had been terse. “I can’t be happy here,” she had said that Monday morning as the taxi driver loaded the trunk into his bulbous Plymouth van. “You’ll be better off without me.”

Blythe, less than a year old and still in diapers, had gurgled and clapped her hands, a string of teething drool pooling on Andrew’s sleeve. The radio was playing that inane Sonny and Cher song, “I Got You Babe.” The baby reached both starfish hands out to her mother. Lavinia paused, but the brief flicker of hesitation in her eyes quickly hardened into icy resolve.

“Be well,” she said, and then she was gone.

A few moments later, May Lin arrived with the laundry delivery. Andrew was still standing in the middle of the shop, frozen, surrounded by his customers’ typewriters, cash registers, and adding machines, with Blythe snuggled against his chest.

The sight of May thawed him out. He and May had fallen in love as teenagers, but her family forbade her to be courted by Andrew, a gweilo. His own parents had not forbidden it, but they’d warned him that there could be no easy future with a Celestial—their archaic term for Chinese people in America. May Lin entered an arranged marriage to an older man from her father’s district in China. He had a laundry, he needed a wife, and that was that.

Heartsick, Andrew had sought solace in the arms of Lavinia. She was stunningly beautiful, and when she got pregnant, he was foolish enough to believe the sense of obligation that bound him was a kind of love.

Each week, when he and May saw each other, they rarely spoke. They didn’t need to, because they knew each other’s hearts without words.

And little Blythe became the center of his world. His ray of sunshine, he called her, a black-eyed Susan of a child who sang songs and read stories all the livelong day. She had a little rocking chair right next to his by the dormer window in the sitting room, and he could still remember the way the evening light used to slant through the window, settling over her like a benediction while she was absorbed in a book.

As the years passed, they had their ups and downs, but the core of their relationship was a fierce, protective love. He taught her touch-typing and watched her win spelling bees. Though the teenage years mystified him, he indulged her yearning for pretty clothes and baffling tubes of makeup. For the father-daughter dance in high school, he’d taught her a passable foxtrot, and she had lamented that he’d set the bar too high for any boy to reach.

He harbored no regrets about the way things had unfolded. He had the world’s most wonderful child and enough common sense to know, finally, that love took the heart by surprise. Lavinia was gone, but she had left behind the very best part of herself. Of them both.

“It was just the two of us,” Andrew told the gathering at Blythe’s memorial. Their faces were a distant blur, but memories stood out clearly in his mind. “She was my daily joy. It’s probably hard for you to imagine, but there was a time when the Lost and Found Bookshop was a typewriter showroom, with a letterpress printing operation in the basement. I made my living by fixing the very things a writer uses every day. Founding the bookshop was Blythe’s idea, and it was a great adventure for us both.”

The day Blythe went away to college, Andrew thought he might die from missing her. It was just across the bay in Berkeley, but it might as well have been in Timbuktu for all his lonely heart knew. He lived for the weekends when she would come home with high-flown ideas in her head and a collection of dirty laundry in a faded cloth bag, still stenciled with their name and Chinese characters. His typewriter business was in sharp decline thanks to the computer revolution, and he spent most of his days reading the antique books someone had left in the basement decades before. He became an expert at restoring the rare volumes, which he displayed in a glass-front barrister case. Every once in a while, a collector would come in and buy one of the books, and the enterprise became more than a hobby.

Four years later, Blythe returned home with a bachelor’s degree, a broken heart, and an unexpected pregnancy. She tearfully confessed that she had fallen in love with a teaching assistant who had promised her the world. She’d believed him, in her hopeful, romantic way, imagining a life of adventure with the young doctoral candidate.

Then she discovered in the most hurtful of ways that the man was already married and had three children.

Andrew’s private, selfish secret was that he couldn’t thank Dean Fogarty enough. The man who had broken his daughter’s heart had given Andrew a new purpose. Blythe had needed a way to provide for herself and her child. Andrew needed a fresh direction in life. Together, they had founded the bookstore, both energized by the prospect of creating a future for themselves and little Natalie.

He looked out at the gathering once again and brought the present moment into focus. Familiar faces, names lost in the cobwebs. There were ghosts as well, people who had left, yet remained a lingering presence in his mind. He had a fanciful thought that somehow they offered Blythe a loving welcome into their midst.

Please let it be true, he thought.

The rest of his eulogy was brief, highlighting the things he loved best about Blythe, the things he would miss the most. He knew the words were not enough, but they were all he had to pay tribute to his one and only child.

“I am quite certain I will never laugh without hearing her laugh. I will never smile without seeing her bright smile. I’m grateful to all of you for being a part of her brilliant, precious life. I feel sorry for those who missed out on knowing this exceptional person.” A gasp of sorrow built in his chest and he paused, then spoke again. “In a moment, you’ll hear from another exceptional person. Of all the gifts my daughter gave to the world, the greatest is her own daughter, Natalie.”

Andrew kept himself steady as he stepped back, though his knees threatened to give out. A new song started up, Natalie accompanied him back to his seat, and he sank down with as much dignity as he could muster.

“I’m up next,” she said, “and I have no idea how I’ll follow that.”

Her tears were silver tracks of grief salting her achingly lovely face. Blythe’s face. One and the same, and maybe this was the reason he was confused sometimes. He held tightly to the top of the cane as “What a Wonderful World” filled the hall. He didn’t really need the cane, but by now it was a habit. And maybe a way to keep himself from drifting away forever, on a raft of unutterable sadness.

Natalie didn’t sing along with the rest of the gathering as she awaited her turn at the podium. Instead, she time-traveled, trying to visit her mother in a different era, trying to bring her back to life.

When Natalie was little, her mother had dwelled at the bright center of her world, an incandescent force organizing their lives around books and ideas.

Even at a very young age, Natalie had understood that this was unusual. That their family was unusual.

She remembered a time when she was in the fourth grade—Mrs. Blessing, California History—and came home in a quandary: “We’re doing family trees in school,” she told her mother, “and I feel weird about mine.”

“Why do you feel weird about it?” Blythe quite frequently responded to Natalie with a question about her feelings. She read tons of parenting books and got all kinds of ideas from them.

“Kayla says we have an alternative lifestyle. She told everyone at recess that means we’re freaks.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Mom remarked, smoothing her hand over the pages of an antique book. She liked to display the most special collector’s items in a lighted glass case under the counter. People who wanted a closer look had to ask, and they had to wear white gloves when they touched the pages.

“Is it a good thing?” asked Natalie.

“What it is,” Mom said, finally looking up, “is none of her goddamn business.”

Natalie always felt a little forbidden thrill when her mother swore. She didn’t do it often, because she said too much swearing watered down the effect.

“Can I tell her that?”

“Sure, but brace yourself for the reaction.” Mom carefully placed the book in the case, laying it open to a page with an illustration of a bird. Then she went over to the coffee area and gave Natalie a cookie from Sugar, the bakery across the street, and poured her a glass of cold milk. It was their afternoon ritual each day when Natalie got home from school.

Blythe set the tray on a tiny table in the coffee area. She often said she wanted to make more room for coffee to serve to customers but didn’t want to sacrifice shelf space for the books. “I love our family. And I know you do, too. Just because it’s not like other families doesn’t mean a thing. It certainly doesn’t mean we are freaks.”

Natalie took the city bus to school. Her friends had carpools, some of them with drivers in polished chauffeur’s livery. Mom didn’t even have a car. Natalie’s friends all had fathers. Or stepfathers. Or two mothers. Or two dads. She had only ever met her birth father a couple of times. His name was Dean Fogarty, and she didn’t like him much. Mainly because he didn’t seem to like her. Mom called him her biggest mistake that had resulted in her greatest accomplishment. “He gave me you, Nat,” Mom would say. “So I can never have any regrets.”

Natalie took a bite of the soft, sugared ginger-molasses cookie. She wasn’t sure being someone’s greatest accomplishment was as important as it sounded.

“We had to draw a picture of our family and I felt weird about it.” She took her sketch out of her backpack and laid it on the counter. She had drawn the people as precisely as she could—her mother’s wavy black hair, Grandy’s wonderful height, her own missing front tooth, May Lin’s half-moon smile, and Gilly the shop cat, curled into a marmalade-colored ball.

“What made you feel weird?”

In her mind’s eye, Natalie envisioned the other kids’ drawings. Most of them featured a mom, a dad, and a brother or sister or two, always with a lovely house in the background. There were a few Mrs. Blessing called “blended families,” which sounded very nice, like a special drink at the Rainbow Soda Fountain down the street. And then there was Calvin with his two daddies, and Anson with his two mommies, which wasn’t a big deal on account of this being San Francisco and all. No one would ever say anything mean about families like that. Mom was always pointing out that lots of kids had single moms. Still, when it came to Natalie, there were questions.

“How come you have a grandfather but no father?” she’d been asked.

“Who’s that Chinese lady?” Kayla had demanded.

“She lives with us,” Natalie explained.

“Is she, like, your maid? Your nanny?”

Most of the kids at Natalie’s school had both maids and nannies, because this was an Expensive Neighborhood and they all lived in houses or even mansions, not apartments tucked above a bookshop.

“Well?” Kayla had prodded.

Natalie had wanted so badly to lie, but she was really bad at lying. “She’s my grandfather’s friend.”

“Like his girlfriend?”

“I guess so.” For some reason, she had been embarrassed by the conversation. She looked up at her mom and decided not to mention that particular exchange.

“No one gets to tell you what to think or how to feel,” Mom said. “That’s your choice.”

“Then why do I feel like a freak? ’Cause I sure as heck wouldn’t choose that.”

Her mother looked at her. Then a spark lit her eyes. “Over here,” she said, gesturing at the children’s section.

Oh boy. A Book Talk, her mother’s specialty. Natalie finished her cookie and chased it down with a final gulp of milk, then washed her hands at the sink. She did like books and reading, but sometimes she just wanted to talk to her mom. She listened, though, because her mother never failed to find the exact-right perfect book, and she read it in a way that made you want to listen forever.

As always, her mother was right. There was a book for everything. Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, her mom could find a book that embodied exactly the things Natalie was worrying about.

And sure enough, Maya Running, about a girl from India whose family didn’t fit in, did make her feel better. Like she wasn’t the only kid in the world with a different kind of family. You’re never alone when you’re reading a book, Mom liked to say.

At the end of the song, Natalie returned to the podium carrying a book and her folder of notes, along with a packet of tissues. With an excess of care, she opened the book and lowered the mic. “I’m Natalie,” she said. “Blythe’s daughter.”

Almost immediately, her throat was clogged by tears that scalded her with pain. She started to panic, because she desperately wanted to be heard. Big swallow. Deep breath. She had awakened early this morning in order to practice getting through her piece without falling apart. One recommended technique was to squeeze the flesh between her index finger and thumb as hard as she could, letting the pinch remind her to keep it together.

“Books were my mother’s world, but she was mine. We lived in the apartment above the shop, and every day with my mom was an adventure. We didn’t travel far on vacations because of the shop.”

Natalie used to beg to travel the world the way her friends did on school holidays—Disneyland, Hawaii, London, Japan. Instead, her mom would take her on flights of the imagination to Prince Edward Island, to Sutter’s Mill, to Narnia and Sunnybrook Farm, to outer space and Hogwarts.

She tried her best to bring her mother back to life with a few key anecdotes and memories smeared by tears. And then she looked down at the page she’d read many times growing up—from The Minpins by Roald Dahl. “The first time my mother read this book to me was after a visit to the Claymore Arboretum. I was five years old, and I believed the dragonflies were fairies, and that tiny sprites rode around on the backs of songbirds. She let me go on thinking that for as long as I pleased. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the best parenting advice ever.”

She breathed in, imagining the comfortable scent of her mother’s bathrobe as they snuggled together for their nightly story. She breathed out, hoping her words would somehow touch her mother one more time.

“‘And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’”

Natalie closed the book and hugged it to her chest the way she used to do as a child. When she spoke again, her voice was surprisingly, gratifyingly steady. “I could keep you here all day with stories about my mother,” she said. “Mom wouldn’t have liked that, though. She always believed we’re all capable of living our own stories, and nothing else can compare to that. So I will leave you with this: thank you.”

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