But when she opened her app to film a quick story test, there they were—all of her notifications. All the messages. Flaring red and looking like they were screaming at her, shouting for her to take notice and to respond immediately.

Rinn turned her phone so that its screen was facedown and away from her for a moment. She took a deep breath. She could handle this. She had just stolen back her phone from the office. She was not beholden to all of her messages. Not right now. Right now, she was unstoppable.

And with that in mind, Rinn decided to take a slight detour on her way back to the register and find AJ.

He was shelving books in the history section. Rinn tapped him on the shoulder.

AJ turned around, smiling his quiet, devastating smile. Rinn felt her heartbeat all the way in her throat, and she didn’t even mind that it was the kind of cliché she’d read about in countless contemporary romances, because the sensation was real and true and there weren’t any other words for it.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.” Rinn tried her best to keep the breathlessness from her voice. Tried to sound measured.

“I found this in the dollar section in the back.” AJ reached into the back pocket of his jeans and held out a book.

Rinn took the paperback and flipped it over directly. She tried not to stare as his hair flopped into his eyes. “Oh, the next Dorothy Sayers in the series. How did you know?”

“I saw that the last one was lying around in the break room. I assumed you had finished it.”

“Oh.” Rinn had hoped, secretly, that he’d watched one of her daily vlog videos and saw that she had finished it. That he’d read the caption on her post. Had read her words, had watched her tell a tale on the internet. But it hadn’t been any of those things. It was just leaving a copy of the last one in the break room. Sure, he’d still noticed. But it wasn’t the same as noticing someone on their accounts, watching what they were up to because he had no other way of knowing.

Not the way Rinn watched his updates when he posted his art online. Not the way she obsessively checked his web comic. But AJ, apparently, had no such need for her posts. Rinn wasn’t sure why she cared so much. Her book account had transformed so long ago from something she did for herself to a business that she ought to have found it easy not to take it personally.

Rinn decided then and there not to be totally disheartened.

Unfortunately, what her brain decided and what her heart felt were two radically different things. “I really loved it—Strong Poison, I mean. It was really a phenomenal mystery.”