He looked at me a long moment, as if debating the criteria of cowardice, then turned and stormed off toward Temple Bar.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief and limped into the bookstore.

Even if it hadn’t been a much-needed sanctuary, I would have loved BB&B. I’ve found my calling, and it isn’t being a sidheseer. It’s running a bookstore, especially one that carries the best fashion magazines, pretty pens, stationery, and journals, and has such an upscale, elegant atmosphere. It embodies all the things I always wanted to be myself: smart, classy, polished, tasteful.

The first thing that strikes you when you step inside Barrons Books and Baubles, besides the abundance of gleaming rich mahogany and beveled glass windows, is a mildly disorienting sensation of spatial anomaly, as if you’ve slid open a matchbox and found a football field tucked neatly inside.

The main room is about seventy feet long and fifty feet wide. The front half vaults straight up to the roof, four grand stories. Ornate mahogany bookcases line each level, from floor to molding. Behind elegant banisters, platform walkways permit catwalk access on the second, third, and fourth levels. Ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.

The first floor has freestanding shelves arranged in wide aisles on the left, two seating cozies, fore and aft, with an elegant, enameled gas fireplace (in front of which I spend a great deal of time trying to thaw out from Dublin’s chilly weather) and a cashier station on the right, behind which is a fridge, a small TV, and my sound dock. Beyond the rear balconies on the upper levels are more books, including the very rare ones, and some of those baubles the sign mentions, secured in locked display cabinets.

Costly rugs drape the hardwood floors. The furniture is old-world, sumptuous, and expensive, like the authentic tufted Chesterfield sofa I like to curl up on and read. The lights are antique sconces and recessed bulbs of a particular amber hue that cast everything in a warm buttery glow.

When I cross the threshold from the cold, wet, crazy streets outside and step into the bookstore I feel like I can breathe. When I open for business and begin ringing up purchases on the old-fashioned cash register that tinkles a tiny silver bell each time the drawer pops open, my life feels simple and good, and I can forget all my problems for a while.

I glanced at my watch, and kicked off my ruined shoes. It was nearly midnight. Just a few hours ago, I’d been sitting in the rear conversation area with the enigmatic owner of the bookstore, demanding to know what he was.

As usual, he hadn’t answered me.