Part One Chapter One

Most of her dreams ended with babies.

They came in many forms: newborns, toddlers, crying, giggling, sleeping, playing, feeding. Lucy always found herself, wrapped heavily in the throes of exhaustion, completely shocked when she awoke. After a moment or two of deep thought, she would come to the conclusion that she deeply longed for a family.

She was only twenty-six. There would be plenty of time for her to settle down and raise a family after she’d developed her career to its peak. Children were for when you had nothing else to look forward to, she reasoned. They were for when you could not advance your profession any further or nurture stronger ties with your existing loved ones. After children, Lucy would be old, and that was the last thing she wanted at the moment.

She certainly felt old. As a city librarian she lived a dull life, but it was a path she’d felt morally obligated to follow. Both of her parents had pursued the occupation and with both of them dead, it felt like a narrow but reasonable connection to them. Plus, Lucy had always had an unbridled love for the dusty volumes that she guarded.

Did it matter that she rarely ventured beyond the routine she had created for herself? She didn’t think so. Her brother Sean was of the belief that she would collapse soon if she didn’t get inebriated once in a while, but Lucy found this theory a bit contradictory. She did not need to become slobbering drunk to know how to live. She was doing just fine with her morning mocha and her 12:15 lunch and her Indian takeout during Oprah.

It was with this resolved attitude that Lucy stepped from the T on Tuesday morning, her conservative high heels clacking away on the cement floor. As she strolled towards the stairs, a homeless man caught her eye, a mass of blankets and padding huddled near the exit. He glanced at her as she passed and raised a tin cup in a lackluster motion. Lucy had been raised in the city and trained not to donate to the homeless; without thinking, she kept moving and kept thinking.

She had an appointment with the curator for a nearby museum at noon, one in which they would discuss the possibility of designing a tour merging both the museum and the historic library. Lucy found the idea initially tempting, but the curator’s repetition of the phrases “very profitable” and “a big win for tourism” killed her excitement. She did not want her precious library to become a tacky tourist attraction; she did not want her beloved books stained by the grease of suntan oil. Her library was not a Boston duck tour or a cutesy gift shop. It was a haven for the intellectuals, a sanctuary for the introverted bookworms like herself.

Lucy entered her office with a sigh of relief, shutting the silence of the library behind her. She peeled her worn wool coat from her shoulders and draped it over the back of her desk chair. She smiled around at the space as she smoothed a stray blond hair back into her thick plait. A year ago, she wouldn’t have dreamed of having her own office. She was accustomed to scuttling around the workplaces of others, delivering messages and typing notices. Now she was the one giving demands—certainly not the highest up in the library hierarchy, but definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Since it was still early, the library was not yet open to the public. Lucy wandered the aisles of the poetry section and looked up at the towering shelves, beyond the volumes that nobody could ever reach. She was proud of their collection: with over fourteen million volumes and a historic foundation, Winton Public Library was the largest in the city.

“Excuse me?”

Lucy spun around, nearly knocking over the person behind her. “I’m sorry, yes?”

It was a patron of the library, the first of the morning. “Do you happen to have any Hemingway short story collections? I’ve just been looking all over.”

Lucy smiled, checking her watch. It was eight o’clock, and her work was officially beginning. She tried not to condescend to the frail old woman before her—probably born the same year as Hemingway—but slowly led her to the library’s discrete gathering of short stories. The lady had not been far off; poetry was shelved very closely to short stories in this library. Lucy was mildly annoyed, however, that these inquiries flooded her every day. The sections were clearly labeled to prevent this confusion, and while she could understand uncertainty regarding the Dewey decimal system, this sort of thing was absurd.

However, she realized again that the woman was old and helped her to gather a collection of Hemingway stories. She helped her to sign out her books and was faced once again with the monotony of the still morning.

Lucy drummed her fingernails on the sturdy oak desk, yawning with boredom rather than fatigue. A coworker and friend, Catherine Bellevue entered through the front access, waving her hand in greeting.

She looked worn out. Lucy examined the younger girl’s eyes for dark circles; sure enough, her pale blue eyes were heavily shadowed. Lucy smirked. “Rough night, Cat?”

Catherine groaned. “I woke up in my bath tub. I’m pretty sure Mark put me there.”

“You were that bad, huh?”

“Never trust the Long Island Iced Tea,” Catherine warned, rubbing her head before pulling her messy dark curls into a ponytail.

“But thank God for Mark,” Lucy pointed out, offering her cup of coffee to the poor individual beside her. “Could’ve been a lot worse.” Lucy had met Mark on several occasions, most of which involved bars as they seemed to be Cat’s preferred rendezvous location. He was not terribly attractive by Catherine’s normal standards, but he worked a stable job as a paralegal and was priceless as his girlfriend’s guardian angel.

Catherine nodded, smiling to herself but wincing as her hangover throbbed. “Yup,” she groaned, almost beneath her breath. “He’s a real lifesaver.”

Lucy sat gingerly on a desk chair and Catherine perched silently beside her. “So what did you do?” the latter finally questioned after a long pause. “Go out last night?” Catherine was sarcastic, so Lucy knew she wasn’t feeling too terribly ill.

“Yes, I went club-hopping and woke up in an alleyway missing both of my leopard print high heels,” Lucy responded, rolling her eyes with mild irritation. “It was crazy.”

“Please tell me you didn’t stay in again,” Catherine moaned, shaking her head in disbelief. “You are such a damned hermit, Luce! You’re twenty-six years old, for crying out loud. You’re going to be old soon, old enough to like….get married, or have kids, or something…”

“Oh, don’t even give me that,” Lucy snapped. “You and Mark are practically married as it is.”

“Yeah, but we know how to get drunk,” Catherine explained wisely. “It keeps us young.”

Lucy ignored her, hoping that her lack of response would cause her friend to quiet. She hoped in vain.

Catherine yapped on. “I really wish you would get over Michael already. He wasn’t that special, Luce. To tell you the truth, he was kind of a loser.”

I don’t care, Lucy thought. I don’t care what you think. I know he was a loser. Obviously. That’s why I broke up with him. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love him anymore.

“I didn’t go out when I was with him, either, Catherine.”

“That’s right. You did everything with him. He had you on an incredibly short leash, you know.”

Lucy glared at Catherine, preparing a retort. Before she could respond, however, a patron crept to the desk, his eyes flickering hesitantly over the feuding pair.

“Um, hi,” he broached, his sea green eyes twinkling with humor. “I was wondering if you could help direct me to the poetry section?”

Lucy balked for a moment. It was rare for a grown man to be in search of poetry; the section’s typical customers were either stuffy old women or flighty young girls who left in tears because of the weight of the genre. Poetry was not, as many believed, equivalent to song or light, easy reading. Lucy found it the absolute gateway into the writer’s mind, a piece of work that was not bogged down by myriad vowels and punctuation but broken down into concise, meaningful phrases.

The man before her did not seem at all flighty. He was large, with broad, sweeping shoulders and a thick chest. He must have been well over six feet tall, as Lucy found herself staring up at him from her elevated desk. He looked like he could be a linebacker for the NFL or perhaps a professional hitman, but definitely not the type of person who would lurk in a library.

“Um, sure,” Lucy answered, stepping from her post and abruptly stumbling as she did so. Her face reddened, but she faced the patron with dignity. She found herself not at all annoyed that she was once again being asked to point out a labeled section. “What particular poet do you have in mind, sir?”

He followed her as she walked briskly to her favorite division. “Wordsworth.”

Lucy smiled. “That’s romantic. You don’t want Shakespeare to impress your girlfriend?”

The man shuddered. “God, no. I’d rather jump off a bridge than force that Shakespearean bull down any woman’s throat. Honestly, I do not find comparing a lover to a summer’s day particularly endearing. Are you calling her dry and sweaty? No, it’s Wordsworth or Rilke for me.”

“Rilke?” Lucy stopped in her tracks. “You find Rainer Marie Rilke romantic?”

“Of course I do,” he replied. “The man’s complete lack of faith in the world was to die for. What else is more romantic than being willing to lose the world in favor of a lover? And his fascination with angels would make any woman swoon, I would think. He compares females to angels, creatures who are so perfect and pure and divine that they could never be touched. Above all he respects his lovers, which is really what epitomizes the romanticism of his poetry.”

Lucy didn’t say anything. They reached the poetry in silence, one of them thoughtful, the other completely stunned. She’d never thought of the German poet in that manner, but she certainly would from now on.

“And also,” he touched her arm lightly as she guided him to the proper aisles. “The poetry is not for my girlfriend. I don’t have a girlfriend. I just like poetry.”

Lucy nodded, feeling claustrophobic in the narrow space between the shelves. She never had before, but the towering man she faced blocked out a great deal of light and his words tugged at her oxygen. “It’s rare to find a man of your….well a man, really, in search of poetry. This is one of the least browsed sections in the library, right next to travel information for Greenland.”

He shrugged. “I just find the emotional complexity extremely fascinating. I always have. I don’t tell my friends about the volumes I have stashed underneath my bed. I’m afraid my license to grow a beard would be completely stripped.”

They laughed together and Lucy pointed out where Wordsworth sat on a lower shelf. Dutifully, she returned to her desk as he browsed, but she found herself glancing continually where he stood although his form was concealed behind the tall shelves.

Catherine rolled her eyes as he approached with a stack of books. She produced a nail file from pocket and stepped aside. “Go ahead, Luce. Your boy is back.”

Lucy set to work signing the man out. He watched her steadily as she shuffled the books beneath the scanner and typed his name, Mark Thompson, into the system. He glanced at Catherine, shooting her a radiant smile as he took his books.

“Do you like poetry, too?”

“Hate the stuff.”

Mark frowned noticeably, gazing at his watch. He sighed in frustration, gesturing towards the door. “Well, thank you, Lucy. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

“You too, Mr. Thompson,” she replied with a polite smile. “Have a nice day.”

As he left the room, he called out to her, “It seems a day….one of those heavenly days that cannot die!” With that, he turned on his heel, and Lucy turned back to her work, trying to forget the poetic mystery that was Mark Thompson.