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She rolled up her sleeves and reached to flick on a table lamp sitting on a small table near the window, casting a warm glow in the room, the soft light limning across her cheekbones for a moment before she turned away again.

I made my way over to the bookshelves, gaze sliding over pristine hardcover editions with their sprayed edges and built-in ribbon bookmarks, displayed like trophies. But on the shelf directly beside them were dog-eared, broken-spined paperbacks with highlighter bleeding to the edges of the pages.

These weren’t just books she’d consumed. She’d re-read them. Many times. Annotated them. Likely memorized whole passages.

She’d lived in them.

I reached for the one most loved of all, the spine paper-soft from bending, the pages slipping as the glue slowly retired from its job.

It was, judging from its cover, one of those romances from the nineties that sat on every end cap in the bookstores, their covers and titles discreet.

I thumbed it open, reading notes in the margins, scanning the highlighted passages.

I set it back among the stacks, reaching for another, then another.

Different styles, different authors, but all of them romances.

Something tugged at me, a strange sense of déjà vu, but it was gone too quickly to source.

Back in the kitchen, Maggie was cracking eggs into the bowl as I moved away from the bookshelves and toward her desk.

She had three paperbacks stacked there. The middle one had a store receipt stuck between the pages like a bookmark. The top one looked like one of the ones Grum was always reading.

There was a hint of her station self on her desk—dozens of sticky notes with handwriting sloppier than at work. None of them made sense at first until I pieced it together for what it was: research. Reminders of plot holes to close up.

These were story notes.

She was a writer.

Funny that she’d never mentioned it.

There it was again, that tug of familiarity. Like an answer just out of reach.

This time, I reached toward it, then—

“Your sad bean juice is ready,” Maggie called.

My gaze slid up, finding her glancing at me over her shoulder, a warm smile tugging at her lips.

There was something new about her right then. Something softer.

At work, she was the resident chaos coordinator, the mess cleaner, the frazzled, harried manager everyone piled their problems on, to the point where I wasn’t sure how she didn’t crack under the weight.

This was the same woman, but stripped of the need to perform, to take on the burden of everything.

Her shoulders were more lax, her eyes tender, everything about her at ease.

I moved toward her, just barely resisting the urge to step behind her, to lean down and press my face into her neck.

I’d just moved in at her side when the hall door burst open, making me jerk, but Maggie just smiled and shook her head.

Grand entrances, it seemed, were normal around here.

“You wouldn’t believe—oh,” Tess broke off. “You’re here.”

“I walked Maggie home.”

“Right.”