The Book I Didn’t Get to Keep
I’ve always believed the threads of a life are spun long before we feel them pull. Mine started knotting toward Nightfall years before I’d ever heard the name, at a rare book convention in Seattle, over a book I fully intended to take home alone.
It was the last copy of The Household Correspondences of Agnes Wren, shelved beside a display of eighteenth-century botanical texts. I had my hand on it at the exact moment a nineteen-year-old girl put hers on it too. Her name was DJ. She was a culinary student, up from school in Oregon for the weekend, and she argued for that book with a conviction I rarely saw in anyone, let alone someone her age. I argued back. Neither of us gave an inch, and somewhere in the middle of it we both started laughing.
In the end we split the cost and spent the rest of the afternoon over tea, talking about domestic magic: bread charms, hearth wards, the quiet spells that hide inside recipes. By the time the convention hall emptied, I knew I’d made a friend for life.
We wrote to each other after that. Letters, mostly, and later texts, about recipes and old paper and whatever life was doing to us that month. I knew she was studying down in Bend, but she never mentioned the name of her hometown, and I never pressed. It didn’t seem to matter. Some friendships don’t need a map.
Al’s Long Campaign
Al B, meanwhile, had been trying to get me out of Seattle for years.
Back then Kyorinrin, my antiquarian book and art business, lived entirely online, and Al was the kind of client who bought beautifully and called often. Far too often, once he’d decided I belonged in his mountain town. Every month the phone would ring and that smooth-as-velvet voice would start in again. Nightfall needed a proper bookshop. A block of three vacant storefronts had come up on Main Street. The center one was practically made for me.
He talked endlessly about a young baker he’d taken under his wing, and spoke of her like a culinary saint. He never said her name, and I never asked. I assumed she was one more piece of Al’s grand vision, and I was perfectly content in Seattle, thank you very much.
There was one favor I didn’t refuse him. About four years before all this, Al called to say a heartbroken dragon needed to fly south to visit someone he loved, without tearing the Weft. Aunt Sou and the Seelie Court were crafting him a flight harness, and they needed an Air witch to make the anchor. I spun the air-current threads myself. Al called the dragon Barnaby. It never occurred to me to ask who Barnaby was flying to see.
The Warehouse on the Waterfront
The day everything came together, I was standing in an enormous architectural antique warehouse near the Seattle waterfront, in my dark green trench coat with my curls pinned back in silver, while Al, for once, made his pitch in person. He was wearing a crimson-and-gold Hawaiian shirt and dark sunglasses indoors, and holding a cup of espresso as if it were a scepter.
“I’m telling you, Nettie,” he purred, “the corner space right next door to your potential shop is turning into the absolute crown jewel of the Pacific Northwest. They’ve installed stone deck ovens, a custom dragon-height marble station, and a rooftop botanical garden! You need to pack up Kyorinrin, leave Seattle, and move to Nightfall.”
I laughed. “Al, you have been trying to coax me out to your magical mountain enclave for years. You call me every month! Who is this mysterious baker anyway? You talk about her like she’s a culinary saint.”
What I didn’t know, and what DJ only told me later over a very long dinner, was that she was one aisle over. She’d driven up that weekend to furnish The Snug, the bakery’s little dining room, and had spent three hours wandering the warehouse, running her fingers over carved oak sideboards and stacks of apothecary drawers, hunting for rustic tables, velvet armchairs, and brass lamps. She was looking over a Victorian velvet armchair when she heard Al’s voice, and then mine.
From behind a giant carved oak sideboard came a voice I knew from four years of letters.
“Did someone say mysterious baker?”
Al and I both spun around, and there she was, grinning at us like she’d just pulled off the greatest trick of her life.
My jaw dropped. “DJ?! What on earth are you doing in Seattle? Wait… you’re the baker Al won’t shut up about?!”
Al looked back and forth between us, blinking behind his sunglasses. “Wait a minute. You two know each other?!”
“We’ve been pen pals for four years!” DJ laughed, and threw her arms around me. “We met at the Seattle Rare Book Fair when I was a freshman!”
“You never told me you lived in Nightfall!” I squealed, hugging her back. “You just said you were at school in Oregon!”
“And you never told me you were thinking about moving to Nightfall! You just said a client kept pestering you about a storefront!”
Al threw his hands in the air, and his laugh boomed off the rafters. “I have been working overtime for four years trying to introduce my two favorite people, and you’ve been texting each other the entire time?!”
Then DJ went very still. I watched the pieces click together behind her eyes as she looked from me to Al and back again.
“Al,” she said slowly, “when you said you had an Air witch friend who helped Aunt Sou and the Seelie Court make Puff’s Weft flight harness so he could visit me at school…”
My hands flew to my mouth. “Barnaby?!” I couldn’t stop laughing. “The chunky carrier pigeon you kept writing about in your letters was Puff? A real dragon?!”
“You made his Weft anchor?!”
“I spun the air-current threads myself!” I was wheezing by then, wiping tears from my eyes. “Al called me four years ago saying a heartbroken dragon needed to fly to school without tearing the Weft. I had no idea Barnaby belonged to you!“
Al smirked, adjusted his sunglasses, and took a slow sip of his espresso. “So, Nettie. You’ve got an antiquarian bookshop. The storefront next to DJ’s bakery is wide open. Your best friend is the baker, and her dragon flies on your magic.” He flashed a blinding, white-fanged smile. “Are you finally ready to move to Nightfall?”
I looked at DJ. I looked at the old furniture all around us, every piece of it waiting for a new home. And I let out a long, happy sigh.
“Pack the moving van, Al,” I said. “Dragonfly Books & Art Gallery is coming to Main Street.”
Main Street
Looking back, it was the most seamless thing in the world. DJ and I were already the dearest of friends. Al got his favorite bakers, DJ and Puff, settled into the corner shop on Main Street, where Layer & Leaf Bakery finally had its home. And I took the center storefront, with Al’s backing and his relentless vision, and gave Kyorinrin a door people could walk through: Dragonfly Books & Art Gallery.
The third storefront on our block wouldn’t stay empty for long, either. It would soon catch the eye of a traveling Wayfinder witch named Jenn Day and her botanical shop, Mother Earth Botanika. But that is a story for another afternoon.
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