For the life of me, I can’t get used to calling my buxom, middle-aged, bottle-bright-red-haired assistant manager Cinderella. And it’s not like she identifies as a humble, hardworking woman waiting for her prince—she just got a free name change after her divorce was final. Most people, I assume, change back to their original name, but Cinderella isn’t most people.

“I got you something,” she says, her eyes sparkling.

Cinderella places a light blue pin on my open palm with such tenderness you’d think she was handing over the Heart of the Ocean.

The white letters read: Nonpracticing Romantic.

“Get it?” Her smile lights up her face. “You’d be a practicing romantic if you ever went on a date.”

“How about I’ll start dating when you do?”

Cinderella blushes and shakes her head. I don’t think she’s been on a single date in the seven years since her divorce—right about the time she started coming into the store. Every day, she’d sit in a nook and read, crying over the happy endings. She treated her book therapy like a job, and eventually we gave her one.

I don’t regret hiring Cinderella, but I do regret telling her I loved the Boss Bitch pin she gifted me on her first day. Last I counted, I had nearly two hundred pieces of “flair.” I fear the day she gives me a second lanyard.

“I saw the pin on a customer’s jacket and knew it was meant for you,” Cinderella says. “She didn’t want to part with it, but she finally agreed to a little barter.”

Persephone purrs at my feet until I pick her up. She always seems to know when I could use cheering up—unlike Hades, who keeps his distance unless I pop a can of tuna.

“A barter?” I ask, afraid to hear the details.

Cinderella shrugs. “I gave her the ARC of Ali Hazelwood’s next book. I figured since we’d both read it already…”

“Absolutely,” I say, grateful she didn’t trade a book we could’ve sold. This penny-counting stuff is new for me—we’re going to have to step it up. Tighten our bootstraps. Our belts? Whatever the metaphor, we need to do better than Josie’s store and all their hardcover books with price tags as big as their authors’ vocabularies. With those profit margins, she’ll only have to sell half what we will.

The bell on the front door chimes, and two regular customers walk in, laughing and smiling.

“Hey, handsome.” Michael is dressed as himself today, not as his alter ego, Ginger, the star of our monthly Drag Queen Story Time for teens. “I’m ready for a new book boyfriend.”

“I know just the guy!”

And with that, I switch gears and do what I do best: match readers with stories to help them realize they deserve the kind of love people write books about.

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