A great, brutish dog towers over me, the wiry fur of his muzzle tickling the back of my neck as he sniffs and then licks my right ear.

I don’t bother trying to imagine how I would frame this massive beast in a lens. He’s much too big. Except … he looks almost exactly like one of those hounds of old that one would find reclining in front of a massive fireplace after a long day of hunting with his royal master.

I lie frozen as he licks my other ear and lets out a low woof of excitement.

“I am so very sorry.” Hands carefully pull me by the elbows, up from where I’m sprawled on the floor. “He is insufferable and particularly rambunctious when he’s hungry. But he’s completely harmless, except for the small matter of believing he is less than half his size. Are you okay?”

The whirl of activity slows enough that I finally get a look at my rescuer’s face, and I choke back a gasp. I recognize him instantly as the boy from the festival, the one I tumbled into at the top of the stairs. The last time I saw him, I had been running toward Jenna.

But evidently he doesn’t recognize me, because he’s looking at me with large eyes and a patient expression, so I mutter, “I’m okay. Thanks.”

“You’re sure? He’s heavy,” the boy says, his voice stern as he glares down at the dog, who looks up with a tongue-lolling, unabashed grin.

Something about his voice sounds familiar, too. When it clicks, I dig through my head in search of the name of the boy who helped me on the phone. “Are you Alex?” I ask.

His smile falls a little, bemused, and he tilts his head. “Yes. Have we met?”

I look past him, pulled from our conversation by the sound of claws scratching. The beast is jumping up to sprawl his front paws onto the counter next to the woman at the register, a long string of saliva dangling from his tongue and toward a stack of papers.

“Not now, Wally,” she says. The woman doesn’t even look at him as she roughly pulls him down by the collar, and his splayed front legs knock over a jar full of bookmarks. The dog busies himself with picking one of the laminated papers off the floor, biting at the flat surface.

This is the boy who said there was no record of Jenna here. It’s like a daydream come to life.

“I’m Amelia,” I say, sticking out my hand.

He reaches forward to shake it, but still looks confused.

“Amelia?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. Amelia Griffin. I called about the limited edition of The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky?”