“Excuse me?” Ashley’s head was still stuck in the past. She could smell the hospital room, hear the sounds of the machines and see her mother’s pale face.

“Which program did you choose?”

“Oh.” She forced herself back to the present. “Computer science. I’ve always been good at it. My dad always joked that he was too old to understand it, so I needed to learn everything so that I could teach him. He’d fix my car, I’d fix his laptop, that kind of thing. After he died I went on a summer program. I hoped he would have been proud that I did that.”

“I’m sure he would. And you enjoyed it?”

“Yes. They taught me some HTML, CSS, some JavaScript. It was great. They had these really cool people talk to us, and they’d done interesting stuff. It was probably a good thing to do because I got my first choice of college—” She shrugged, embarrassed by how much she’d told Joanna, who was a stranger. “But that might have been because I’m a girl.”

“Why would you say that?”

Ashley picked at the corner of her fingernail. “Because there aren’t enough girls doing STEM subjects.”

“I’m sure that’s not why you got a place. I’m sure it’s because you’re smart, and they were smart enough to see that. They saw potential.” Joanna paused. “There are plenty of people out there who will make you think you’re not good enough. That you should think small. Play it safe. Be less than you’re capable of being. The important thing is not to believe them. If there’s something you badly want to do, if you have a dream, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.” Something in the way she said it made Ashley wonder if someone, at some point, had made Joanna feel she wasn’t good enough.

“Did you have a dream?”

“At your age?” Joanna gave a quiet smile. “Yes. I wanted to work in a bookstore. I wanted to spend my days helping people choose exactly the right book for their mood. I found books such a comfort when I was growing up, and I wanted to help other people find that.”

Ashley thought about the bookshelves she’d seen. “But you never did work in a bookstore?”

“No. And I regret that. I should have worked in a bookstore instead of waiting tables.”

Because then she would never have met Cliff? Was that what she was saying?

She thought about Joanna’s life. She’d been married to a celebrity, and her days and nights had seemed to be an endless round of red carpet events. For many people, that would be the dream. But not Joanna. She’d wanted to work in a bookstore, which just went to prove that one person’s dream was another’s nightmare.