The spins overtook Daniella for a moment. She reached out, steadying herself on a nearby parked car. It took two counts for the spinning to stop again. Daniella reached back into her bag and mercifully found the store keys, despite the fact that her sunglasses blocked her ability to see any real depth into her purse. She’d been searching by feel and had grabbed at her notebook more times than she cared to in a public setting. Nobody knew about Daniella’s poetry, and she was planning on keeping it that way.

She hadn’t figured out how to compartmentalize her life for nothing.

Daniella crossed the narrow, flat street, under the speckled shade of the big, circular buckthorn trees. She rounded the corner and made it to the front door of Wild Nights Bookstore and Emporium.

AJ Park was sitting against the curb. AJ was one of those devastatingly handsome artistic boys, with hair that flopped into his eyes and clothes that were perfectly worn in. He looked like the kind of kid who could reveal the mysteries of the universe in his deep, dark eyes.

Daniella preferred boys who held no mysteries and carried no depth. They were the kind of boys who were good for one thing and one thing only. The kind of boys who a girl only needed liability insurance for. Destroy or be destroyed. AJ was too thoughtful to be the kind of boy that drew Daniella’s interest. And AJ seemed to see nothing in Daniella but another one of his three sisters. They could be friends in perfect safety.

But even AJ didn’t know about Daniella’s writing.

Daniella hadn’t meant to become a great secret keeper. But she had learned early that information was not just power—it was safety. So she kept from AJ, too, that Wild Nights Bookstore was about to close.

According to Eli, at least.

Daniella had to assume that she could trust Eli, that he wasn’t exaggerating for effect or lying by omission, but that wasn’t an assumption made lightly or easily by Daniella. Ever.

“What’s up?” AJ stood; he brushed some of the asphalt rubble from the back of his pants.

Daniella shrugged. All she had to do was compartmentalize this one thing. Just one more segmented section of her life. Easy. “The same.”

“You close last night?” asked AJ.

“No, didn’t you hear? Jo trusted Eli to close. Alone. Told me I could have the evening off. I guess she decided to trust him. Or try out trusting him.” Daniella hoped her worry didn’t show on her face. Eli was a hell-raiser, but he was basically harmless. He liked to give Jo shit and then do everything that Jo asked. Or at least, that’s what Daniella had always assumed. She’d hate to give him the benefit of the doubt now, at the end of things, when he didn’t deserve it.