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I remember this progression from the Kenosha Public Library, where I’d haunt the stacks after school until my father picked me up, neither of us wanting to enter our empty house alone. I step back in wonder as the organizing principle of Evelyn Cabot’s bookshop reveals itself to me. It’s Dewey decimal, the books arranged and classified by subject, though lacking the numbered stickers librarians use.

Amazed, I pull out my phone and search for a chart of Dewey decimal classifications. Racing up and down aisles, I read shelf labels to test my theory. Yes—Philosophy is followed by Religion, then Sociology, Government, and Law. Books about English grammar are grouped with novels written in French and textbooks for learning Mandarin Chinese. I finally understand why Fiction, which fills an entire aisle of bookcases, is located in the middle of the barn instead of up front like in a regular bookstore. Remembering what Wren said about the village librarian renting a room here, I wonder what role she might have played in Evelyn adopting this system for the bookshop.

Comparing Red Barn Books to a library spurs me to imagine what these millions of words can teach me. It’s like being at the center of the internet except everything’s real. Evelyn Cabot managed to fix a roof and build a business, too, without any help from a search engine. What would it be like to return to those times, that way of learning?

I make a vow to myself: From now on, whenever I need to know something, I’ll look for a book before going online. It’ll be slower, sure, but satisfyingly tactile, cloth and cardboard I can touch instead of bits and bytes I don’t even understand.

Going back to the shelf of books about bees, I’m surprised to find a novel, City of the Bees by Frank Stuart. Mixing fiction with nonfiction defies Dewey’s system, but I suppose the subject is so specific, Evelyn must have decided only a person looking for information on bees would want to read a novel about them. Curious, I open it. The first paragraph describes a bee ascending rapturously into the blue summer sky. Instead of interpreting the worker bee’s seasonal life span as pathetically short, the author celebrates a creature who will never know the sadness of winter. Perhaps Heaven is like that, I read, with new loveliness disclosing and increasing forever, and never a midsummer day to mark the tragic point of no return.

The novel seems too romantic to be useful but I take it anyway, thinking City of the Bees might make a nice bedtime story. Next, I choose The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture by A. I. and E. R. Root. Published in Ohio in 1910, it promises to be “a cyclopedia of everything pertaining to the care of the honeybee.” I love the gold bee embossed on the brown cover, but skimming the pages reveals its extensive entries are aimed at an expert, which I decidedly am not. I’m about to close the book when my attention is arrested by the heading “Beekeeping for Women.” Credited to Anna Botsford Comstock—well-known, according to her byline, for writing a handbook for beginning beekeepers—the entry is so engaging, I read it through until I’m stopped cold by this passage:

Bees are of particular interest to women for several reasons: if she likes good housekeeping, then the bee is a model; if she likes a woman of business, again is the bee a shining light; if she is interested in the care of the young, then is the bee-nurse an example of perfection; if she believes in the political rights of woman, she will find the highest feminine political wisdom in the constitution of the bee commune. In fact, it is only as a wife that the bee is a little too casual to pose as ideal, although as a widow she is certainly remarkable.

Sandra compared me to the queen bee, but I couldn’t care less about becoming a remarkable widow. What hits me like a slap across the face is how casually I became David’s wife. My vision blurs as the barn is replaced by memories more real to me than metal shelves and timber beams.

Since sleep was impossible while the band was playing, I returned to the Irish bar beneath my sublet three nights in a row. Each time, David’s smile when he spotted me from the stage pushed Colton farther from my mind until he was as distant a memory as the boy who took me to prom. When the bar’s weekend headliner displaced David’s band, they all piled in a van to go play an Irish festival in Monmouth. I used the couple of lonely days to finish cleaning the filthy apartment, scrubbing away every trace of the slob who listed it and bleaching the stained sheets until they shimmered. The next time I saw David play, I downed a glass of Writers’ Tears and invited him upstairs.

That strange sense of familiarity we felt on first seeing each other intensified in bed, the smell of our sweat blending with the tang of those bleached sheets. Afterward, David claimed we must have been reincarnated lovers, united at last after centuries of seeking. It was a ridiculous idea that seemed, in the moment, totally believable. For my part, I thought of Mary Oliver’s wild geese. I did not speak to David of goodness or despair, only marveled at the way his arms around me felt like finding home.

It soon seemed as if David O’Shea was the real reason I came to Manhattan, not the job I hadn’t started yet. We passed those long summer days exploring the city or lolling in bed. I spent my weeknights watching him play and my weekends at the library, researching small presses that accepted unsolicited submissions and preparing query letters for Dad’s Apprentice. Other than the van, David didn’t exactly have a fixed address. Before long, we were living together in my sublet, but that was only booked through August. The on-campus housing I’d lined up for September consisted of a single room in a grad student dorm with no space for a musician boyfriend. One night at the bar, I overheard a patron say he’d gotten a last-minute job offer in Texas and needed someone to take over his lease. I bought him a drink and asked about the place. The rent was relatively cheap for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, the Hell’s Kitchen location not far from where David was playing, the address convenient for the crosstown bus to Grand Central. By the time he finished his drink, we had a deal. The guy was leaving in two days. I promised to be there tomorrow with enough money to cover what remained of that month’s rent.

David came with me, of course. The five flights of stairs were discouraging but not a deal-breaker. When the guy opened his door to let us in, though, we found ourselves in a dark box in which every window faced a brick building, paint was peeling from every wall, and every faucet dripped.

“You know me, babe, I can live anywhere,” David said when the guy stepped out, “but you deserve better than this.”

“What I deserve doesn’t factor into it,” I replied, making a mental list of projects, starting with fixing those faucets. “This is all I can afford on what the college will be paying me.”

“I’m not asking you to support me,” David objected. “I’m making good money at the pub.”

“You are now,” I said, picturing the beer-soaked bills he pulled from his pockets after a gig, “but my job is temporary and your visa expires in the spring. Before you know it, I’ll be back on the academic market and you’ll be flying home to your emerald isle. Instead of overspending on an apartment, I want us to make the most of the time we have.”

Make the most of it we did, creating memories in which the two of us would forever be paired. Wandering through Central Park while leaves spun down like red and gold confetti. Cheering the looming balloons of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Ice-skating in Rockefeller Center, the lit tree towering overhead. Counting down the dropping ball on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. A five-course dinner in Little Italy to celebrate the acceptance of Dad’s Apprentice by a well-regarded independent press.

As the days grew in warmth and light, I braced myself for the pain of our parting. Miraculously, we were each handed a reprieve. First, David’s band was rebooked as the pub’s headline act, enabling him to extend his P-2 visa. Then the college’s famous professor of the personal essay decided to retire, leading the English department to keep me on while they ramped up a tenure-track search. Grateful for whatever luck had aligned our stars, I transferred the apartment’s lease into my own name and settled in for the unexpected gift of a second year in New York with David.

Playing only on weekends now, David started picking up session work from a recording studio, his extra income enriching our lives with day trips and concert tickets and flea market finds. David encouraged me to apply for the tenure-track job, though I doubted the college would pick me to fill such storied shoes. Then Dad’s Apprentice, which had been selling surprisingly well for a sad story from a small press, was optioned by a Hollywood producer. The project never did get greenlit and the option eventually lapsed, but for a moment the prospect of my book becoming a movie was enough to dazzle the hiring committee into offering me the position.

I should have been elated. I wasn’t. I never intended to live in New York for more than a year; I’d already been there for two. When David’s band came to the end of their contract, he’d be ineligible for another visa extension. The city meant nothing to me without him in it.

We were making our rounds of the farmer’s market on a Sunday morning in April when I told David I was going to turn down the tenure-track job. “New York’s not really my scene,” I said. “I’d love to visit you in Ireland, though, after you go home, if you’ll have me?”

David was silent for so long, I was afraid I’d overstepped his affections. We’d had a good run, sure, but the longer he went without speaking, the more certain I became that he’d been secretly looking forward to being free of me.

We were in front of the stall for Toigo Orchards, last fall’s apple crop piled behind green heaps of garlic scapes, when David finally turned to me. “What if, instead of going back to Ireland, I made you my home?”

“What does that mean?”

I figured his laces had come undone when he dropped to one knee. I only realized what was happening when he pulled a ring from his pocket and slipped it onto my finger.

“Won’t you marry me, Audrey Beacon?”

Embarrassment burned my face as people stopped their shopping to witness his impromptu proposal. Instead of shrieking a gleeful yes, I bent down to whisper in his ear. “You want to marry me so you can stay in America?”

“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.” He stood up and cupped my face, pine-scented fingertips pressed against my cheeks. With those blue eyes of his locked on mine, he said, softly, “I’d rather think of it as wanting to stay in America so I can marry you.”

I looked at the ring, those two golden hands holding a tiny crowned heart. My own heart sped up in my chest—not from joy, but from terror. Life had schooled me in the harsh truth that nothing lasts. I knew in my bones that whatever I loved would one day be ripped away. To sanctify our relationship with marriage would be like waving a red cape at the horns of fate.

But what David was proposing wasn’t really matrimony, was it? It would be a green card marriage, a legal arrangement, a business partnership between two people who happened to be lovers. I was the one with citizenship and health insurance and the prospect of secure employment in the city he loved. It would be selfish of me not to share all that with the man I loved, wouldn’t it?