She looked embarrassed.
“It sounds silly now.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m forty-eight, my marriage is collapsing, and I have a mortgage to worry about.”
“None of those things explains why a bookstore is silly.”
She smiled faintly.
“When Daniel was young, I used to take him to this little shop near the old library. I loved the smell of the pages, the quiet, the feeling that every book contained a different life waiting to be discovered.”
“What happened?”
“Michael’s career took off. We moved. Then Daniel needed stability. Then my father became ill. There was always something more urgent.”
“And the bookstore?”
She stirred her coffee.
“It became a dream I kept postponing until I eventually convinced myself I had outgrown it.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t outgrow a dream just because you stop talking about it.”
She studied me.
“Have you always been this annoyingly optimistic?”
“No. I used to be much worse.”
