Rinn looked through the stickers, trying to find a way to add a geotag to the location. But it came up empty. She couldn’t believe it. Rinn clicked a few more times, because that had to be a mistake. It wasn’t, though. Wild Nights Bookstore wasn’t even on the map anymore. Then Rinn felt a tug as her phone was snatched out neatly from her hand. She whipped around.

Jo had her hand on her hip and her eyebrow raised. “How many times do I have to tell you—no filming in the store?”

Rinn stretched out her smile in an exaggerated nervous expression. She wasn’t faking it, per se. But she did hope that exaggerating the look on her face could at least be comedically winning. “Always once more?”

“Nice try.” Jo rolled her eyes. “I’m confiscating this.”

“But, Jo—” Oh my God she couldn’t take Rinn’s phone. Jo wasn’t a principal or a teacher. As much as the whole staff liked to rag on Jo for being old, she couldn’t have been more than ten years older than Rinn, really.

“No buts,” said Jo. “Now is not the time to piss off Hunt Junior, trust me on this. And given how much you love Brock Harvey, I’m not leaving your self-control in your own hands on this one. You can have this back at the end of the day. After the signing.” Then Jo stuck Rinn’s phone into her back pocket and walked off.

But Rinn didn’t lose at anything if she could help it.

She was going to save Wild Nights all by herself if she had to. And the first order of business was putting it back on the map.

4

Eternity in an Hour

9:02 A.M.

Daniella

Why had she told Rinn Olivera that the store was going under?

That totally had not been Daniella’s intention. Not that she had any intentions other than to get to the bathroom as quick as humanly possible. A wave of nausea had come over Daniella so fast and so furious, she had felt like she was in the middle of a Tokyo drift. Mercifully, she had reached the bathroom in time. She was going to lay her face on the cold tile and then the wave of nausea would pass.

That was, of course, when Daniella spotted all the hair. Little bits and pieces of it. Small dustings of short clippings. Imogen had cleaned up most of the big chunks that she had shaved off, but nothing short of a broom or a vacuum was going to get the stuff that now clung to all the crevices of the bathroom.

The urge to vomit intensified, and Daniella was forced into a dilemma—stay in the bathroom and definitely throw up but have an excellent receptacle (i.e., the toilet), or leave the bathroom and maybe don’t vomit, but lack a proper receptacle if she did.