It took just three trips from the car to the second-floor bedroom. Harry’s old room had never really been his room; at least he had never thought of it that way. His mother had died of lung cancer when he was fifteen years old. Back then they’d lived in a two-bedroom apartment above his father’s first shop—Ackerson’s Rare Books—in the West Village in New York City. Because Harry had just begun high school when his mother died, his father had decided that it would be best for them both to stay in Manhattan until Harry had graduated. Living with his father in the dark, narrow apartment, made somehow smaller by his mother’s absence, was both terrible and comforting. As long as they continued to live there, they could feel Emily Ackerson’s presence, and the cold fact that she was gone forever.

In summertime, Harry and his father tended to spend more time in Sanford, Maine, than they did in New York. It was Bill’s hometown; his sister and her family, plus a cousin he was close to, still lived there. On those trips, Bill began to scout locations for a second rare-books store, one along the coast. They rented a cottage on Kennewick Beach so that Bill could spend more time looking at properties. That was how he’d met Alice Moss, who was working as an agent at Coast Home Realty. They became engaged during Harry’s senior year of high school, and when Harry went off to college, his father had made the permanent move to Maine, marrying Alice and buying the Victorian fixer-upper that he’d named Grey Lady. His business partner, Ron Krakowski, kept the New York store running, and Bill and Alice opened a second store in Kennewick Village, walking distance to the house.