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Ghosts couldn’t be real because if they were, she would have seen his by now.
Everything you need to know, you can find in your library, her dad used to say. Este clung to the defiant hope that she’d find a piece of him in this one.
Typical. The most attractive human specimen this side of Burlington, and he caught her attempting to sneak into the restricted section.
His smile flickered, a contained flame.
With its ornate exterior and sprawling collection of antique texts, the Lilith exuded a permanence unlike anything else in Este’s life.
He smelled like a sun-drenched memory—like well-worn book pages and Vermont’s white cedar groves.
“I saw your scholarship announcement, Este Logano. You’ve got a legacy to fulfill.”
Posy was thrilled to see everyone. She was a human golden retriever. Este was a crab, all pinchers and an exoskeleton shell.
“I know you’re mad at me. Stay mad if you want. But I promise you, I’m not the worst thing haunting this school.”
The amusement in his eyes made her think he relished seeing Este like this—stunned silent.
Finally, Luca asked Mateo, “This is the one you won’t stop talking about?” Mateo rubbed his palm across the back of his neck. “Yes, this is Este Logano.”
Her name in his mouth sounded like a threat and a promise.
He cocked his head with a smile. “You’ll make a great librarian yet, Este Logano.”
His existence was an ice-bath shock to her nervous system.
“You sent a whole search party after me,” he said, sounding as pleased as she had imagined.
He cocked his head on a fist, haughty as a man made into a marble statue. “I’m a wanted man.”
She was digging her dad up, shovel by shovel, and unearthing a part of him she’d never known. For the first time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what she’d find.
“Dr. Kirk said there’s this school tradition about how if you kiss someone at the Hesper Fountain, your love will last forever.”
When he smiled, it was hard to look away.
Her dad was supposed to be defined by active verbs.
The look of knowing someone and being known right back.
“You think my dad Duolingo’d the language of the dead?” “Sometimes you say things, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you know that?”
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Her heart skipped a traitorous beat when he said, “You’ve got yourself a date.”
“You’re extraordinarily troublesome,” he said with a smile that made her heart thud twice as hard.
It was evident in the way their feet and shoulders angled toward him—the sun to their summer blooms.
Mateo was the only clear thing in a world of star-webbed wonder. If she focused on the architecture of him—his pointed arch brows, his starched white shirt and the barrel vault curve of his shoulders beneath—she could stand steady.
“For a moment, I thought I’d surely lost you. It’s a vulnerable thing to have, a body.”
Este had ignored every voice mail, silenced all her calls. Sometimes talking to the only person who understood hurt too much.
“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”
Could it be enough if all they ever had was almost—almost touches, almost together, almost real?
But the touch of Mateo’s fingers against her cheek sent electrifying telegram signals to every nerve of her body. It was worse because she wanted it.
Love only ever ended up in broken halves. One buried, one left behind.
Este drifted through the stacks, the ghost of his touch still warm on her skin. He was just another thing that wouldn’t last.
Forget the demented a cappella group—the scariest part about all this is how much I miss you when you’re not around.
“You know, most people start with hello?” “Hello, Este, dear.”
Este hated how comfortable he looked on her bed, but she hated worse how she didn’t even really hate it at all.
“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”
Seeing him like this—buoyant and boyish—steadied her. He was laughing, his face shining like an Edison bulb. She hoped it never turned off.
It was all too easy to get used to this—a lazy togetherness, content in his company.
It wouldn’t be so bad, an eternity like this with him: crisp October breezes tapping at the windowpanes, wool-socked toes padding across polished floors, dawns and twilights running together like watercolors.
Standing in her doorway with her backpack slung over her shoulder, it felt humanly impossible to leave Mateo like this. All she wanted to do was waste the day away lying beside him, memorizing the dark ribbons of his hair and the slant of his smirk.
Future librarian. The words rang like a dinner bell, calling Este home.
Libraries were the rope tying her to the fading memory of her father. Her soft landing, her solace.
Her father was to blame for breaking the Fades’ vicious cycle, and her mother was a one-woman traveling show. There was no one waiting for her. No one to notice if she never came home.
She’d trusted him, and he’d betrayed her—the realization was a silver dagger between the soft of her ribs, straight to her bleeding heart.
She hadn’t asked him to come in, to make a space for himself in her heart.
He asked, “Este, dear, is everything okay?” “Don’t call me that anymore,” she snarled. “Don’t call me anything anymore.”
The look of something lost. Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.
She wouldn’t let him get close to her—not again. It was all a ruse with him. A foxhunt, and she was the prized kill.
