Birdman glared at Rinn. Lena glared at Rinn. And Rinn couldn’t really glare back at both of them at the same time.

Rinn had to backtrack. She didn’t want to send Lena to Imogen. But she also didn’t want the two of them to get into another knockdown, drag-out, yelling match on the store floor. Plus, Rinn also didn’t feel like being yelled at again from a man trying to sell—as she had just tabulated—$15.47 in bird-watching and philosophy books. He was already going to be mad enough that his books were worth next to nothing. Rinn had to make an assessment and make it fast. “I think she’s out back.”

“Thank you,” said Lena, tilting her head. “Now, was that so difficult?”

But Lena didn’t wait for Rinn to answer her, instead moving out toward the back door. And Rinn was sure that whatever waited for Lena outside, difficult was only the beginning of it.

8

Mad Girl’s Love Song

10:46 A.M.

Imogen

Imogen didn’t know how to have this conversation with Jo. It was obvious from the way Jo was talking that she was basically admitting to the fact that the bookstore was closing.

It didn’t matter why. It didn’t matter how. Imogen could read the truth in all of Jo’s looks. That Jo had kept secrets, better than Imogen had ever suspected. In some ways, this made Jo more like a regular adult than Imogen had thought possible.

Jo kept the truth from them to keep them safe.

Lied to them.

Just because Jo was in charge and she thought that made her more adept at dealing with these kinds of things. All the things that grown-ups remained silent about welled up in Imogen’s chest. Reminded her that they never ever spoke about the nothing that was swallowing her up—the nothing that was pervading the edges of her family and taking a grip in her home.

I found myself within the middle of a dark woods where the straight way was lost.

Imogen didn’t mean to think in poetry. But her mother had been obsessed, and obsession was a catching thing. Have you read the Suheir Hammad yet, habibti? What about the Mary Oliver? Did you get to the Dante this week?

All that Shakespeare hadn’t been part of some random literary obsession. Mama had read through the Arabic language, then through the Persian. Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. Al-Mutanabbi. Hafiz. Nizami. Abu Nawas. She’d read her way through both canons and beyond. And then she’d started in on the English. Aphra Behn’s plays in verse. She’d cleared her way through the Romantics—Byron and Shelley and Keats, yes, but also Mary Robinson and Joanna Baillie. Imogen’s sister had been named Wallada. Imogen had missed a normal name by six volumes.

Miss by an inch, miss by an entire culture.