It couldn’t be possible, but wow, it sure looked similar.

He bent down for a closer look, his head cocked to the side at the same height as the counter, as he peered through the glass.

A sudden jolt in his chest made him stand up and step back as if struck by a slap to the face.

Could it be?

No.

Impossible.

He stepped back and tapped a finger above the book, expecting a minute bolt of lightning to fly up and meet his touch, like those electrical balls they sold in gimmick shops that respond to your hand.

“This book here with the flowing design on the cover. It doesn’t have a title.”

The man’s voice, croaky and weary: “Which one?”

“Green cover. Old looking.”

“They’re all old,” said the man, stroking his gray-stubbled chin.

He slid open a cabinet door and reached in to retrieve the volume. Then he leaned sideways to pick up a pair of glasses perched on the cash register.

“Hmm. When did you arrive?” he said, examining the book, turning it over in his hands.

“How much?” asked William, as the man’s gnarled and arthritic fingers handed the thing that couldn’t exist to William.

“Hmph. Don’t rightly know. Joe might-ta bought these from someone yesterday when I wasn’t here.”

William took the book and stared at the cover. His fingertips tingled, minute icy particles of energy feathered his skin, sweeping over his hands. He waited for the sensation to travel into the rest of his body, but nothing came. Instead the feeling faded, a detonation wick fizzling out.

It had disappeared, he told himself, because that was his imagination playing with him.

Had to be. Didn’t it?

He sensed the man’s gaze upon him as he opened the pages. For some reason, the action caused small beads of sweat to rise on the back of his neck as if a humidity switch had been flicked.

Ridiculous for him to react this way because it was impossible for this to be the book.

In the first few pages, in scrawled handwriting from a time before computers, a time before ballpoint pens, when someone with a feather and ink wrote by candlelight, were the lines of observations. And dates. And pluses and minuses and wishes and curses.

Whether the writers were related, a grandmother, great-great-grandmother, a great-aunt or a sister, he couldn’t know. Many authors, was all he surmised from the different handwriting and notations.

Absolutely. Not. Possible.

But he believed he held in his possession another diary of balance-sheet luck. Orelia’s face swam through his mind as she’d stood in the rain demanding he return what was hers, the one burned and turned to a pulp.

The last words she ever spoke: What have you done?

Now as he flipped through the pages of this beautiful and dangerous green book, he wondered too what he had actually done?

He placed the book on the counter for fear his shaking hands might drop it. With a slow, reverent touch he closed the covers and left his palm resting over it.