He was tall, with light brown skin, dark hair in a top knot, and green eyes—striking enough that Carmen felt a faint sadness that she was about to be directing him to the youth hostel down the other end of the Grassmarket, and that many of the shop’s customers were generally closer in age to Mr. McCredie than to herself.

“Hello?” she said cheerfully.

“Hello,” he said. His voice was deep, with a very faint accent, and Carmen picked up the well-used desk map in anticipation.

“I was wondering if you had a copy of The Physiology of Tree Soil.”

Carmen looked at him and was about to call for Mr. McCredie, when she realized Mr. McCredie would instantly corner him and talk his ears off.

“I’m sure we could order it for you,” she said. “Are you a student?”

He smiled. “Do I look like a student?”

“You could not look more like a student if you had one of those raggedy scarfs and were trying to split a coffee four ways.”

He laughed. “You don’t like students?”

Carmen shrugged. Sofia’s elegant friends who had occasionally come to visit, or showed up to her bachelorette party, her wedding, her christenings, all her simply fabulous parties in a variety of increasingly fancy apartments, seemed callow and entitled, bristling with confidence and money. And always, at the back of her mind, her father saying, when she announced she was done with school and was off to work in Dounston’s, “But you’re such a clever girl.” She had always been jealous of students. She covered it up by treating them with a bit of disdain. She could have been one too. It just hadn’t worked out like that.

“I have a huge chip on my shoulder,” she said eventually.

He smiled. “Well then, you will be pleased to know that although I have been a student for a very long time, I am now a lecturer.”

“Who dresses like a student.”

“You’re more confrontational than most people I’ve just met who work in a bookshop.”

“Chip! Shoulder! What do you lecture in? Trees?” Carmen giggled.

“Um, yes,” he said. “I’m a dendrologist.”

“A what?”

“Tree person,” he said hurriedly. “Trees. I’m a student of trees.”

“Oh,” she said. Then she thought about it. “You’d have liked our book about sublime landscapes.”

“I would like that!” he said.

“Ah. We don’t have it.”

“And the other one . . . ?”

“Okay, well, let me order it for you,” she said. There wasn’t a computer in the shop, and she had to call the wholesalers on her phone—really embarrassing—so she kept a book for orders. As she wrote down the details, he picked up a book near the till. It was an illustrated edition of A Christmas Carol Ramsay had sent over on—kindly—a sale or return basis, with paintings by Arthur Rackham.

“Wow,” he murmured.