Page 1 of The Faceoff

Chapter 1

Sloane

The bell above the bookstore door jingles for the seventeenth time in the last hour.

Not that I’m counting.

Okay, I’m absolutely counting.

When you spend an entire summer working six days a week in a bookstore the size of a shoebox, you start keeping track of weird things. Customers. Bell jingles. How many romance novels get shelved in the wrong section because people apparently think Emily Henry belongs next to Stephen King.

The answer is a disturbing number.

I slide another hardcover onto the shelf and step back to admire my work.

Margaret’s Books sits on the corner of Main and Mill Street, squeezed between a bakery that smells like brown sugar and a dying dream of an antique store that has been going out of business for at least three years without ever actually closing. The building itself is old enough to qualify for a senior citizen discount — uneven hardwood floors worn soft in the middle, towering shelves that tilt at angles no structural engineer would endorse, a creaky staircase to the second floor that sounds like it’s actively plotting your murder every time you reach the fifth step.

It’s my favorite place in the world.

The air smells like paper and coffee.

The windows overlook the town green.

And Margaret Sorensen has spent the last three years treating me like the granddaughter she never got around to having.

Outside, Haven is doing what Haven does at the end of August — putting on a show. The green spills down Main Street and up into the hills beyond it, the maples and elms still thick and full, the late light catching gold in the leaves that have started, just barely, to turn at the edges. There’s something in the angle of that light, something low and slow, that says not for much longer. September is three days away. The tourists will start thinning out. The town will exhale.

I have been waiting for that exhale since June.

Whitmore sits at the edge of Haven, separated from the town proper by a wide green quad and the kind of Gothic stone architecture that belongs on a brochure, which is exactly where it appears, four times a year, in high-glossy full color. The campus in summer is a different animal than the campus in September — quieter, slower, populated only by athletes doing preseason training and the theater department running an intensive that I would have taken if it didn’t conflict with my bookstore hours. By next week it’ll be different. The quads will fill back up, the coffee shops will have lines out the door again, and the dining hall on the east side of campus will smell like institutional pasta and ambition.

I find I’m looking forward to it in a way I haven’t let myself admit all summer.

“Sloane.”

I glance toward the counter.

Margaret is peering over the top of her reading glasses, studying something on her laptop with the focused concern she usually reserves for water-damaged first editions.

“Mm?”

“Do you know what TikTok is?”

A smile tugs at my mouth. “Unfortunately.”

She points at the screen. “Someone just posted a video of a man making soup inside a hollowed-out pumpkin.”

I blink. “What kind of soup?”

“Chicken noodle.”

I consider this for a moment. “Honestly? I’ve seen worse.”

Margaret lets out a long, aggrieved sigh. “The internet was a mistake.”

“Probably.”

She mutters something about the decline of civilization before returning her attention to the laptop. I bite back a laugh. Eighty-two years old and somehow still the funniest person I know — though she would absolutely deny that being funny was intentional, which is what makes it work.