“Of course not. It’s from you!”

Reluctantly, Cade draws out the gift. Logan grabs it, tears off the paper, and then says gleefully, “Oh, Cade!” She looks at him with so much love, it knocks him back another step. “This is the best gift ever.”

She flips through the pages of the inn’s copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, the same one that had been sitting on Cade’s nightstand since the first week she waltzed into his life. “You annotated it for me?”

He nods.

She slips it into her carry-on pocket and throws her arms around his neck, giving him a quick peck before pulling away. She hands him her car’s key fob. “Take good care of it,” she says, moving into the security line.

They watch each other. When she turns a corner in the queue, she calls out, “Eighty-six.”

Puzzled, Cade calls back, “Eight-six what?”

Logan smiles. “Check your pocket.”

Each of his cargo side pockets is empty. But in his back pocket, Cade discovers a folded piece of paper from one of the inn’s notepads. He opens it just as Logan disappears from his view.

“Eighty-six days until Thanksgiving break. Can’t wait to see you! Love, Logan”

Cade squeezes the note in his fist the way her words squeeze his heart. He’d had his future figured out. That is, until the assignment and those ten days turned his life upside down.

If you want, you could leave here. Go anywhere, his parents had said.

Cade smooths out Logan’s note on his palm. He reads it again, folds it up, and returns it to his back pocket. Eighty-six days. He imagines sitting at the inn’s reception desk, crossing off each day on a calendar. He imagines baking with and without Nana. Someday. He imagines what the inn might be like when his parents are Nana’s age. He stops, looks up at the departure board—a long list of possibilities. He misses Logan already, but there’s a whole world of possibilities. Who knows where they’ll be, who they’ll be, in eighty-six days?

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear Reader,

A question that has been important to me is this: Can you be proud of your heritage, your faith, your identity, yet also have a strong need to protect or hide yourself from the “outside” world? That duality was something I, as someone Jewish, often lived with, struggled with, ashamedly agonized over.

After I met Archer Shurtliff and Jordan April, two brave teens who refused to do an antisemitic assignment very much like the one depicted in this novel, I realized how much this duality had permeated my being. I felt compelled to confront the issue. This is one of the reasons I wrote The Assignment.

I recall once, as an eight-year-old, being asked by a woman I did not know: “What are you?”

“A girl?” I answered.