“I think we owe this young lady an apology.” Haldon put the book down and started to clap. The rest of the audience joined in. Bridget stared at the tips of her Vans, guessing her face was as red as her hair. She started to return to her seat, but Haldon put his hand on her shoulder.

“Stay. I want to talk to you.”

AJAY

A Very Private Person

“Wait.” Ajay interrupted Bridget’s story. “So you just remembered a single quote from this huge book?” It seemed impossible. “One of six huge books?”

She smiled and shrugged. “It was only four at that point, since I hadn’t read the new one yet. And I had read all the other ones a bunch of times.”

“Why did Haldon ask you to stay?” From his backpack, he pulled out another waxed cloth bag. This one held cherry tomatoes. He offered some to Bridget, but she waved her hand.

“While he was signing, he asked me questions about the series. I answered every single one.”

“That’s cool, but why did Haldon care?” Ajay popped a tomato in his mouth, relishing the tang of it. “It’s not like there was a trivia contest you could win.”

She leaned closer, and his heart did a little hop. “Will you promise not to tell anyone?”

Ajay pinched his finger and thumb together and then ran them across his lips, miming a zipper.

She looked around to make sure no one was paying attention. “He offered me a job.”

“A job?” He rocked back in surprise. “Doing what?”

“Keeping track of all the details. Now every time he has a question about what a character looks like, or a family’s crest, or a geographic location, or who’s descended from whom, he emails me.”

“But how do you figure out the answer?”

“I read and reread the books and make searchable notes. It’s all in a database I made. So suppose Bob wanted to know what he said about drums in previous books. I could look that up in seconds, and it’s all cross-referenced. Like in the second book, he had a character playing a bodhran, which is this Celtic drum made from a goatskin. In the book it’s never even actually called a drum. The reader just picks that up from context. But in my database it’s listed under drum, as well as the word bodhran, and under musical instruments, and under entertainment. It also shows who played it, when, where, and for whom.”

Ajay was impressed. “So you’re like the continuity supervisor, only for books instead of movies.”

“What’s a continuity supervisor?”

“Since they shoot movies out of order, the continuity supervisor makes sure that if a guy is wearing a hat in one scene, he’s still wearing it in the next.”

She tilted her head, her hair swinging. The color was amazing. “How do you know about that?”