The bookstore was on a side street two blocks from Mila's restaurant — a narrow, air-conditioned place called The Last Chapter, with shelves packed floor to ceiling and a cat sleeping on the front counter. It smelled like old paper and salt air, the way all the best bookstores in beach towns do.
I took Cassandra there on a Tuesday morning. She'd been quiet the day before — quieter than usual, which was saying something — and I'd noticed the way she'd been folding into the background while the louder women filled every room. Cassandra wasn't built for chaos. She was built for bookstores.
She moved through the shelves like water — slow, deliberate, her fingers trailing spines the way a musician's fingers trail keys. She pulled books with the reverence of someone handling sacred objects: a Muriel Spark collection, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, a battered history of cartography that she held against her chest like it was a child.
"You like maps?" I said.
