Mine is a face he sees often, even if we’ve never exchanged names. For a second, the world seems to tip when I realize he won’t see me again after tonight. Will he notice? Will someone tell him how they found me in my condo, stretched across the bed, his book splayed open on my chest? Will he remember this night and feel sorry for me?

    “Looking for something new?” he asks brightly.

    I glance down at the tight, black laces of my boots, before meeting his eyes. “No. I think something old tonight. Something . . . familiar.”

    He looks excited by my reply. “We just got a shipment of mid-century paperbacks from an estate sale. They’re in excellent condition. I started shelving them over here,” he says, coming out from behind the register to point me down a middle aisle. “But feel free to rifle through the boxes as well.”

    I give him a taut smile and dip my head in a quiet thank you. As if the universe delivered these just for me.

    My hands skim their wearied spines, a few hardcovers among them, dancing past titles like In Cold Blood and Fear of Flying. I take a moment to pause and admire an impeccable copy of Master of the Game by Sidney Sheldon, which isn’t exactly an upbeat book, but somehow still feels too light for the occasion. It needn’t be maudlin, of course, my final read. But it should have suitable gravitas. It should have some heft.

    And then I see it. A gently faded but otherwise stand-up copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar—a novel about a young woman coming quietly apart at the seams. It’s a hardcover with the jacket still preserved, in that fuzzy black-and-white image of a hand and a rose, with the beautifully dated font in one corner. My fingers close over it, the memory drifting back to me of reading in the kitchen at Solidago, sitting in the sunlight beneath the window, hands sticky with peanut butter and the room smelling of rising dough. I was safe there. My grandfather would never deign to sully himself with women’s work, and Nina, our housekeeper, kept a tight watch on everything that happened in the kitchen. I read The Bell Jar the summer before I turned sixteen, before my breasts came in and my grandfather’s eyes began to follow me like a roving dog. My mother so rarely let me leave the estate, but Nina would bring me books from the library in Bandon where she sometimes stayed with her daughter, Mira, and two young grandsons. I read it on long afternoons beneath the spiky reaches of the coastal Douglas firs and the feathering habit of the Pacific dogwoods on our property, savoring every word, fancying myself a writer, too, someday. Until the new gardener found it and took the book to my grandfather, who deemed it distasteful and threw it into the fire. Everything at the estate had to go through my grandfather first, who kept the property suspended in a museum-like condition, just as it had been when my grandmother Aurelia was alive.

    The recollection sends a shiver of dread up my spine. The graceful columns of Solidago—its white wings outstretched like waiting arms, a field of goldenrods between them—are always a whisper at my back. I clamp The Bell Jar to my chest and swallow down the bile. He’s not here, I remind myself. He can’t hurt you. None of them can. But my grandfather has been the shadow cast over me since the day I was born, even after the fire took his life and my mother’s. Behind him, my grandmother’s spirit rising like the sun, a memory so bright it burns everything it touches.

    I sigh and contemplate slipping the book into my bag, breezing out of the store before the attractive shopkeeper notices. It’s the first real urge to shoplift I’ve felt in years, and it arrives like an unannounced friend, both nostalgic and startling at once. Even as a memory, Solidago has a way of bringing out the worst in me. Stealing was a way of life for me at the estate and, later, in the foster care system. The only chance I had at claiming anything as mine. A small scrap of agency in a sea of loss. I tried to leave it behind after getting busted in a Fred Meyer left me with a class A misdemeanor and possession charges for the marijuana they found when they searched me, settling later in Seattle where, despite my best efforts, I had another encounter with a Target security guard. He was kind and let me wriggle out of a public arrest, but after that, I worked hard to repress it (minus a few exceptions). It was never about the item. Possession was the only power left to me.

    I loosen my grip on the book, and something slips out, falling to my feet. Looking down, I see a square, black envelope. I stoop to pick it up, turning the thick card stock over in my hand. The shock is enough to cause me to drop it again, a bewildered gasp sliding from my lips. There, in golden script, is my true name—Judeth Cole.

    “You okay?” I hear the good-looking man ask from the box he’s sorting near the register.

    Carefully, I lean out from behind the shelf and flash him an embarrassed smile.

    “Paper cut?” he asks cheerily. “Those old dust jackets can be sharp as sheet metal. I’ve got a bandage around here somewhere.”

    “I’m fine,” I reassure him. “Just a silverfish. Startled me.”

    He looks convinced, and I duck back behind the shelf, quickly scooping the envelope up with a shaking hand. My fingers are trembling so much, I can barely tear it open. When I do, a matte black note card waits inside. An invitation.

Judeth Cole:

You are hereby cordially invited

to attend a reception

on your behalf

beneath the Ravenna Park Bridge

September the eighth

at midnight.

Attire—black.

Come if you dare.

Learn what waits in the deep.

Don’t be late.

    A scrolling flourish has been drawn at the bottom, like an ampersand and its reflection, tied together with too many loops. I can’t make out where it begins and ends. It rolls into itself like a snake eating its tail, an unbroken continuum. The shape feels familiar, though I’m certain I’ve never seen it before.

    September the eighth, at midnight—that’s tonight. Shaken, I slide the card into the envelope and put both in my bag, then slowly approach the register.

    “‘At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you,’” the man recites.

    “What?” I stumble as I’m nearly there, raw and exposed.

    “It’s from ‘Daddy,’ by Sylvia Plath. Are you a fan of her poetry?” he asks, holding out a hand for the book.

    “Oh.” My shoulders relax. “No,” I answer a little too curtly. I don’t know how to explain my limited exposure to the outside world growing up. The understanding that I can never catch up to normal; I can never get those years back. “I mean, I’ve only read this book before.”

    “Well, The Bell Jar is a classic.” He smiles with his lips closed, and I realize his hand is still waiting for me to deposit the book in it.

    “Sorry, there’s no price,” I tell him.

    He takes it from me and flips it open, my heart thudding with every turn of the page as if I expect black envelopes to come flying out like confetti. “Hmmm . . . that’s funny.”

    “What?” I ask, wary.

    “I don’t remember this one being in there earlier.” He glances up at me, the aqua gleam of his eyes catching mine. “I don’t usually miss a book.”

    My mouth opens, a stuttering sound escaping.

    “Tell you what, it’s on the house,” he says, passing the novel back to me.

    “Oh, no. I couldn’t.” I try to protest, but he waves me off.

    “It’s not like it’s a first edition or anything,” he says coolly. “Besides, you look like you’ll appreciate it more than most.”

    My eyes trickle down the cropped shadow of his beard and the tan lines of his neck to his chest, where a hint of hair is escaping over the topmost fastened button of his shirt. “Thank you.”

    “Just one thing,” he says before I can turn to leave.

    I meet his gaze, worried he saw what happened behind the shelf, that he’ll ask to see the envelope and somehow read my secrets in it. “Oh?”

    “Come back when you’re done,” he says simply. “Tell me if it’s as good as you remember.”