Page 2 of The Overtime Persuasive

“Ah-ha!” My hand shoots in the air in triumph. “Fleetwood Mac.”

Her face lights up. “Yes!”

“I have a feeling that you’re looking for this.” I turn and reach for a copy of Rumours from the shelf behind the counter.

“That’s the one,” she says with a grin.

“You know the greatest crime committed during the making of this album was cutting ‘Silver Springs’?” I slide Rumours toward her. “Stevie Nicks wrote it about Lindsey Buckingham, named it after Silver Spring, Maryland, and then they stuck it on the B-side of his breakup song about her.”

“Talk about emotional warfare.” She takes the album, then points at me as if I’ve just solved a homicide. “I knew you’d figure it out.”

I ring her up, then watch as she tucks the album under her arm and drifts toward the books.

“That was both equal parts painful and impressive,” my best friend Lucy says from her perch. Another thing about owning your own business is that your friends will loiter at all hours, and you can’t control when they do it. Like this morning, Lucy came by to say hi and now she’s eating through my gummy bear stash like I hired her to do it.

“I thought you’d be looking for that one all week,” she says between bites. “I mean, she had no clue what the title was!”

“I’ve been asked to figure out harder puzzles.” I laugh. “I usually have someone call, hum a few bars, then ask me if I know what the song is.”

“So you’re also clairvoyant?” she asks.

“They also think I can figure it out with a one-word clue,” I snicker. “Like love. The amount of calls I get with ‘I’m looking for a song, and it goes la la la, dun dun, and then love. So, do you know that one?’”

“People call you and ask you about love? Are they on something?” Lucy chokes back a laugh. So rude, but she’s also my best friend, so also fair.

“They’re asking me if I know songs with the word love in the lyrics.” I toss an old comic book at her head as the bell above the front door gives a strangled rattle, one of the leftover components of the building I kept after renovations. I’m not surprised to see Liam Snyder, Lucy’s twin, walking through the door.

“Hey,” he says to me before turning his attention to Lucy. “I’m actually here because of you. Saw you were here, so figured I’d come by and ask if you wanted to pick out a birthday gift for Mom.”

“Saw I was here?” Lucy bark-laughs. “How?”

Liam holds his phone in the air and shakes it. “The GPS tracker Mom had us set up for our locations.”

He thrusts the phone out for us to get a glimpse of his screen. Sure enough, there’s a map of Old Town Alexandria and Lucy’s face is grinning at us from a circle attached to the address of my store.

“Mystery solved,” I say, grabbing a box of music memoirs to stock around the store.

“So, let me get this straight,” Lucy presses on, her tone incredulous. “The man who has forgotten our mother’s birthday for the last two years running has shown up here, today, to get her present taken care of before, what…you forget again?”

Liam rolls his sage-green eyes, reminding me of the teenager he used to be. It’s so wild to me that at some point he turned into a full-blown grown-up dude. A man. The kind of man whose pants hug his hips, and has issues with his T-shirt sleeves being wide enough for his shoulders.

And his biceps. When did he get those? Let’s just say I’d not noticed them until right this very second and they are⁠—

Wow.

His. Biceps.

“I have time right now, as do you,” he says, teasing his sister, “and it was just a thought.”

“Yeah, just a thought alright.” Lucy’s gaze slides from Liam to me, and back again. She sighs and jumps off the counter. “Since you’re here, I’ll take advantage of the opportunity. But you’re paying.”

“Fine.” He claps his hands together. “I’ll follow, you pick it out.”

When Lucy looks my way, I point to the cookbook section, watching as she steers Liam toward it. Some folks might like being friends with a twin, because you could get a two-for-one deal out of it.

However, Lucy’s brother is what I’ve always considered the subscription you accidentally activate at checkout, and have no clue how to cancel it. He’s charming, alright, and has always been good-looking. He’s also got this way of walking into every room like it’s been waiting for him to arrive and bring his brilliance into it.

More annoyingly, most rooms seem to agree.