Chapter 2 - Thirty Minutes, This Time by Choice

Olivia called nine times before noon.

I answered on the tenth because Maple Street Books had exactly three customers, Mr. Patel was in the back arguing with a distributor about damaged dust jackets, and I was tired of watching her name light up my phone beside the register.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“I mean really sorry.”

“I know that too.”

Silence.

The old radiator clanked beneath the front window. Outside, a delivery truck blocked half of Charles Street while a cyclist shouted at the driver.

Olivia exhaled. “Are you going to stop being friends with me?”

“I don’t know.”

The honesty hurt both of us.

“I thought you’d leave,” she said. “I thought you’d roll your eyes, come yell at me, and we’d laugh about how ridiculous it was.”

“You thought you knew what humiliation I’d find funny.”

“I know.”

“No. You know now.”

She went quiet.

I leaned against the counter and looked toward the fiction shelves where we had once spent an entire Saturday reorganizing everything because Olivia insisted novels should be arranged by emotional damage rather than alphabetically.

I loved her. That was the inconvenient part.

Love did not make what she had done harmless.

“I need space,” I said.

“You said that last night.”

“I still mean it today.”

“Okay.”

Then, more softly, “Trevor won’t answer me.”

That caught my attention.

“Since when?”

“Since Daniel asked his name.”

I closed my eyes.

“Olivia, do not call Trevor on my behalf. Do not ask anyone questions because of me. Do not try to fix this.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were absolutely about to.”

She made a miserable sound. “Fine.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

This time, I believed her.

We hung up.

Five minutes later, the bell above the bookstore door rang.

Daniel Brooks walked in carrying no bodyguards, no visible urgency, and the kind of expensive coat that made our crooked wooden floorboards look even more crooked.

Mr. Patel appeared from the back room, saw him, and stopped mid-complaint.

Daniel glanced around.

Maple Street Books had been open since 1974 and had resisted every attempt to modernize itself. The shelves were too close together. The ceiling leaked near history when it rained hard. One brass lamp near the poetry section had to be struck twice before it worked. The place smelled like paper, dust, coffee, and the vanilla candles Mr. Patel pretended not to buy.

I loved it with embarrassing intensity.

Daniel looked toward me.

“I was told I’ve been reading bad fiction.”

I folded my arms. “You came here to complain?”

“To seek professional treatment.”

Mr. Patel looked between us.

“Emily?”

“This is Daniel.”

“I know who Daniel is,” he said quickly.

Daniel offered his hand. “Then you have me at a disadvantage.”

“Ravi Patel.”

They shook.

Mr. Patel relaxed by perhaps three percent.

I stepped from behind the counter. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“A novel in which nobody makes obvious mistakes.”

“That shelf does not exist.”

“Then your business model is flawed.”

“Yet somehow we persist.”

His eyes warmed.

I led him toward fiction and pulled out a battered paperback copy of The Remains of the Day.

He looked at the cover.

“This appears depressing.”

“It is.”

“You remember my objection.”

“I decided it was immature.”

Daniel laughed under his breath.

I handed him the book.

“Read fifty pages. If you hate it, bring it back.”

“You offer refunds based on emotional dissatisfaction?”

“No. You can donate it and complain to me.”

He turned the paperback over in his hands as if nobody had ever given him something worth twelve dollars before.

Then he looked at me.

“I would also like to ask you something.”

Mr. Patel immediately became fascinated by a stack of invoices three feet away.

Daniel waited until I nodded.

“Would you have coffee with me after your shift?”

I glanced at the clock.

“You came all the way here to ask in person?”

“You said to ask when nobody else arranged it.”

I hated how much that pleased me.

“Thirty minutes,” I said.

“Of course.”

“This time I mean thirty.”

“I’ll set a timer.”

“You will not.”

“Then I’ll trust your famous punctuality.”

He bought the battered paperback.

Not the signed first edition displayed behind glass near the register.

Not the rare history volumes Mr. Patel subtly repositioned within his line of sight.

The twelve-dollar paperback I had handed him.

That detail stayed with me after he left.

At six, I found Daniel waiting outside a coffee shop two blocks away. He had changed nothing about himself to look ordinary. Same dark coat. Same calm posture. But he had chosen a place with scratched tables, students on laptops, and a menu written in chalk.

“You researched me,” I said.

“I researched coffee.”

“This place has four stars and no private room.”

“Exactly.”

We ordered at the counter. I paid for my own drink before he could object.

He did not object.

We sat near the window.

For several minutes, we talked about the book. He had already read sixty pages.

“You cheated,” I said.

“You gave me homework.”

“I gave you fifty.”

“I became competitive.”

“That is deeply surprising.”

His smile vanished gradually as he set the book on the table.

“I looked into Trevor Lane.”

I had known this was coming.

“What did you find?”

“He works freelance event staffing through a contractor my company uses. He had access to reservation information he should not have used.”

“That explains how he knew you’d be at the Grand Oak.”

“Yes.”

“Why did he think you were willing to meet me?”

“He didn’t.”

I stared.

Daniel’s jaw tightened.

“Someone sent a message to my assistant claiming a woman named Emily Carter had asked for an introduction through a mutual contact.”

“I definitely did not.”

“I know.”

“You know that now.”

His eyes held mine. “I suspected it before I arrived.”

“Then why come?”

He looked out the window for a moment.

“Curiosity.”

“That’s not flattering.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

I almost smiled.

Then he said, “Trevor says the idea was his. He thought putting me at a table with an unprepared stranger would be funny. Your friends supplied the stranger.”

“That sounds incredibly stupid.”

“It was.”

“Is he fired?”

“From work involving my businesses, yes.”

I waited for the rest.

There was no rest.

“No broken kneecaps?” I asked.

Daniel’s expression went flat.

“I realize people tell stories about me.”

“That was a joke.”

“It’s not a particularly good one.”

“Fair.”

He looked down at his coffee.

“My family has done things I’m not proud of. So have I. I’m not going to pretend the rumors appeared out of nowhere. But I don’t hurt people because they embarrass me.”

The sentence landed with more weight than any denial would have.

“Why tell me that?”

“Because if you’re going to sit across from me voluntarily, you should know I won’t insult you by pretending I’m a misunderstood accountant.”

I looked at him for a long time.

“Are you trying to scare me away?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Giving you information you can use to make your own decision.”

Again, the choice.

Again, he placed it in front of me and did not reach across the table to take it back.

I wrapped both hands around my cup.

“Jason used to do the opposite.”

Daniel did not ask who Jason was.

He waited.

“My ex,” I said. “He would tell me only the part of the truth that got him the answer he wanted. I spent four years thinking that was compromise.”

“What changed?”

“He told me he loved someone else.”

Daniel’s face did not move.

“Then I learned he had been seeing her for almost a year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There you go again.”

“What?”

“Apologizing for things you didn’t do.”

“Maybe I dislike seeing people treated carelessly.”

I studied him.

“That seems inconvenient in your line of work.”

“Very.”

The thirty-minute mark passed.

Neither of us mentioned it.

At seven, we stood outside the coffee shop.

Daniel held up the paperback.

“I’ll finish this tonight.”

“You have nothing else to do?”

“Nothing I’m willing to admit on a second date.”

I laughed.

“Was this a date?”

He looked at me with deliberate seriousness.

“I asked you for coffee. You said yes. I was hoping.”

I should have protected myself with a joke.

Instead I said, “Then it was better than the first one.”

His expression softened.

“I’ll take that.”

He did not try to kiss me.

I was unexpectedly disappointed.

That annoyed me all the way back to the bookstore.

Mr. Patel was still there, sitting behind the register with a folder open in front of him.

“You’re late,” he said.

“By twelve minutes.”

“You are never late.”

“Apparently I’m evolving.”

He did not smile.

I stopped.

“What happened?”

He pushed the folder toward me.

The first page was a notice from the building’s owner.

My eyes moved over the legal language once, then again.

The property containing Maple Street Books and four neighboring storefronts had been sold.

Closing effective in thirty days.

New owner: Brooks Property Group, LLC.

I stared at the name until the letters blurred.

Mr. Patel watched me carefully.

“Emily,” he said, “do you know these people?”

An hour earlier, Daniel had sat across from me talking about choices.

Now his name was on the building that held the one place in Boston I could not imagine losing.

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“Yes,” I said slowly.

“I think I do.”