Then he tosses the book onto the printing press and strides out the shop’s front door.

I exhale a long, shaky breath.

“Yikes,” Mom says. “Already driving away customers. My mother will be so proud.”

Evie waves a dismissive hand. “That’s just Phantom.”

“Who?” Mom says.

“Lucky Karras. Remember the Karrases? His parents used to own the tiny boat-repair business a block away? They bought the big boatyard across the street. Father’s a boat mechanic. Mother runs the business.”

“That’s Nick and Kat Karras’s kid?” Mom says. “Josie’s Lucky?”

A warmth zips up my chest. “He wasn’t mine. We were just friends.” Good friends.

“Did you recognize him?” Mom asks without giving me a chance to respond. “I don’t think he recognized you.”

“He did,” I say, a little dazed.

“He’s been camped out here, watching the window for your U-Haul,” Evie murmurs, giving me a suggestive smile behind my mom’s back.

“Really would have liked to be warned about this before we showed up,” I say through pinched lips.

“Last time I saw him,” Mom muses, oblivious to Evie’s comment, “he was a snotty-nosed little punk with a head full of black curls. When did he grow up into a dark and disenchanted Holden Caufield?”

Evie snorts a short laugh. “A couple years after you guys left town? I call him Phantom of the Bookshop, because he’s in here all the time, brooding in the back.”

“I thought the Karrases moved?” I say, still stunned.

“They did,” Evie says. “Like I said, their business moved across the street.”

That’s not what I meant. I thought they moved out of town—gone. I had no idea he still lived here. All the times we’ve been in and out of Beauty for the occasional weekend over the past few years, I’ve never once seen him or heard about the Karrases.

“He was in that fire before we left town,” Mom says. “At the lake house.”

“His scars … ,” I murmur. The last time I saw him, it was about a week after the fire, and he was bandaged up, in the hospital, awaiting news about surgery. I remember his parents being worried, whispering with doctors when I’d come see him every afternoon at Beauty Memorial during visiting hours, but they said he’d be fine.

Mom and I left town in such a hurry, I never got to say goodbye.

“He had a lot of skin grafts,” Evie says. “I don’t know … I think it changed him, because he sort of withdrew after that. He’s been in and out of a little trouble ever since, but—”

“Whoa. What kind of trouble?” Mom interrupts.

“This and that. You know Beauty,” Evie says with a shrug. “Hard to know what’s gossip and what’s fact.”

“This town eats you alive, one way or another,” Mom says. “Hope he keeps his trouble out of this shop.”