Page 1 of The Professor Orc's Secret
Chapter 1
Ellie
I've rearranged the new releases display twice. The Le Guin goes spine-out on the second shelf because Lily Rivers has a hold on it and she'll want to see it the moment she walks in, not hunt for it. The Shirley Jackson reprint goes face-out because nobody in this town picks up Shirley Jackson unless they can see the cover, and the cover is gorgeous. The Mary Oliver collection goes on the end cap where the afternoon light hits the table, because I'm a librarian and I believe in strategic placement.
Most days the county library gets a version of Ellie Frost in muted earth tones with sensible flats and her hair pinned up with whatever clip didn't fall behind the bathroom vanity. Today I chose a green dress—vintage, fitted at the waist, and bought at the consignment shop on Main because the color reminded me of the moss that grows on the rocks north of the cove. I told myself it's laundry day. Every cardigan is clean and hanging in my closet, but I told myself that, and I believed it for four minutes. Really I dressed up for Colt—Lily's dad.
The worst part isn't that he doesn't notice me. The worst part is that I'm pretty sure he does. And that's a problem I can't solve with the Dewey Decimal System.
The library door swings open at two-fifteen and Lily comes through it the way she comes through every door—at full speed, backpack sliding off one shoulder, a paperback gripped in her hand like evidence she intends to present in court.
"Miss Frost." She drops the backpack on the nearest chair and holds the book up. "I finished the Le Guin. Can we talk about the ending? Because I have problems with it."
I lean against the circulation desk and cross my arms. "What kind of problems?"
"The kind where the author spends three hundred pages building a political system and then resolves it in nine." Lily opens to a dog-eared page. She dog-ears pages. It hurts me on a cellular level and I've stopped correcting her because the arguments she makes about the text are worth the damage to the pages. "Shevek goes home. He just—goes home. After everything he sacrificed, the ending boils down to 'well, I guess I'll try.' That's not resolution. That's avoidance."
I pull up a stool and sit across from her. This is the part of my week I look forward to most, and I don't let myself examine what that means. "Is it avoidance? Or is Le Guin saying that the act of going home with new knowledge is itself revolutionary?"
Lily considers this. She chews the inside of her cheek the way her father does when he's turning over a thought, and the resemblance knocks me sideways for half a second before I recover.
"Maybe," she says. "But revolutionary for who? For the reader, or for Shevek? Because Shevek already knew everything heneeded to know before he left. The journey confirmed it. It didn't change him."
"So you wanted the journey to change him."
"I wanted the ending to cost him something." Lily flips the book closed and sets it on the desk. "The best endings cost the character. Otherwise what's the point?"
She's twelve and she argues about thematic stakes like she's got tenure. Nobody told her she's supposed to soften her opinions, and I hope nobody does. I love this kid. I love this kid in a way that keeps me up at night because she's not mine, and the line between caring about a patron and caring about a person blurred somewhere around the fifth Saturday and I never corrected it.
"I set aside the books from your hold list." I nod toward the shelf behind the desk. "The Octavia Butler, the Le Guin short stories, and the Ursula Vernon you requested."
Lily grins, the expression pulling wide enough to flash the small tusks she hasn't grown into yet. She has her father's broad jaw and dark hair, the same green-grey skin. "The Ursula Vernon? You got it?"
"It arrived Thursday. I may have expedited the request."
"Miss Frost, you're the best."
"I know." I hand her the stack. "Go. Read. Return in the condition you found them."
"No promises about the dog-ears."
"I'm aware."
She tucks the stack under her arm, then pauses. "Hey, Miss Frost? Do you have any of those granola bars left? The ones from the reading program?"
"In the desk drawer. Help yourself."
Lily grabs two and shoves one in her backpack. "Dad forgot to eat again. He does that when he's working. I found him at the kitchen table at midnight last week with, like, four spreadsheets and an empty coffee pot." She says it matter of fact, the way a kid reports everything about their parent. She bites into the other granola bar and talks through it. "I made him a sandwich but he didn't notice it until morning."
I don't say anything to that. But I hear it. And I add it to the list of things I know about Colt Rivers that I have no business keeping track of.
She takes her books to the table by the window—her table, the one she claimed six months ago with the reading lamp that tilts—and opens the Butler before her backpack hits the floor.
I straighten around the circulation desk. Move the date stamp. Adjust the pen cup. Normal things, the small rituals of a Saturday afternoon in a building I've run for four years, a building I rebuilt from an underfunded storage closet into a real county library with programs and holds and an interlibrary loan system that the state association asked me to present at a conference last year. I'm good at this. I like this life. I built it on purpose after Derek slid divorce papers across the table between bites of anniversary pasta, and for five years it held.
Then Colt Rivers started picking up his daughter every Saturday at four o'clock, and the life I built stopped being enough.
The door opens at four.
