“Who’s talking about buying it? I want to give you the store. You know I don’t have any kids, and my nieces… Well, you’ve met Susanne. I appreciate her coming all the way here to help, but I doubt she wants to stay.”

“You can’t do that, Nobby. You inherited the store from your father. What would your family say if you gave it to a virtual stranger?”

Nobby shrugged. “I inherited it from my father because, unlike my brother, I shared his passion for stationery. No one else in the family does, so they’ll just have to live with my decision.”

“That… I…I don’t know what to say.” She cleared her throat to get rid of the lump that had settled there. “Except you do know that you have to stick around for at least thirty more years, right?”

He chuckled and patted her hand. “Not going anywhere.”

“And neither is Paper Love,” Anja said.

Nobby sighed. “I don’t know. Things don’t look good.”

She gripped the edges of the old, worn desk. “How long do we have until…?”

“A month or two. If we don’t see any improvement by March, I’ll have to—”

A knock on the door interrupted the words Anja hadn’t wanted to hear anyway.

“Come in,” Nobby called so quickly that she knew he hadn’t wanted to say them either.

The door opened, and his niece stuck her head into the tiny office. “Um, I have a customer out there, but I don’t understand what he wants—and it’s not just because of his dialect. He says he’s looking for a wet ink. Isn’t all ink wet? I mean, it’s a liquid.”

Anja laughed, leaned over, and gave Nobby’s shoulder a quick squeeze before getting up and walking toward Susanne. “All right. I’ll come save you, fountain pen novice.” She just hoped they could somehow manage to save the entire store too.

“It’s Frau Fountain Pen Novice, please,” Susanne said with a straight face, but a softening around her eyes revealed that she was joking.

So she did have a sense of humor. Good. They would probably need it in the weeks to come.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Susanne flipped through the pen magazine that Frau Lamm had been reading yesterday, trying to familiarize herself with some of the terms of the fountain pen world. Dry ink, wet ink, music nib, squeeze converter, breather hole, piston filler… Dozens of terms buzzed around her brain and made her feel a bit dizzy.

Or maybe her distractedness was responsible for her not grasping any of the terms in the magazine.

After every sentence she read, she peered up from behind the cover of Pen World and glanced over at Frau Lamm, who had climbed up on a stepladder to hang a bunch of paper animals so that they dangled over the island display.