He went back to the laptop. Maybe Jo had found more info than he had. She must have put together her own case of what the business was worth, or at least what the finances looked like. Maybe she had found something that Eli had missed.

Eli opened up Jo’s calendar on the web browser. He looked over the week. Jo had, in all her anal-retentive glory, made a note on her calendar for this Friday—

last day of full staff.

It was such a simple note. No caps lock. No exclamation points. Just a direct statement of fact marked into her calendar.

Here was the thing—Jo had taken Eli in and given him a chance when nobody else would. She’d hired a kid with a record, and instead of yelling at Eli and lecturing him, she had handed him responsibility and told him to step up to the plate. She’d made this space—Wild Nights—a place for the art kids like AJ and the book nerds like Rinn and the angry girls like Imogen. Even Daniella Korres didn’t mind working at Wild Nights, and Danny was disdainful of nearly everything. She rolled her eyes whenever Eli called her Danny. True, when he’d started calling her that, it was kind of a joke. But by now, he couldn’t help it. She had white-blond hair and a heart made out of stone. If anyone could have been a real-life Mother of Dragons, it was Daniella Korres. But she was also more than a fictional queen, so Eli elongated her name when he said it, made sure it sounded like he’d added an extra n and made the nickname her own.

And Jo, she had made the bookstore a haven. She had made it theirs, even though none of them were at all alike, except for the fact that some piece of them didn’t fit in anywhere else. Wild Nights couldn’t just close. Staff couldn’t be let go on Friday, without warning. Jo couldn’t suddenly not have a job. It wasn’t right.

Eli opened a new tab on the browser and started searching. The patron saints of the internet had to tell him something useful.

Because what to do was tough to say.

The first problem was—Eli didn’t have any money.

And he didn’t come from money. And even if he had, given how much trouble he’d gotten into in the past, he doubted his mom would have forked over any funds, no matter how legitimate Eli’s reasons. After her last desperate bid to take Eli back to church had failed to produce any results, Eli’s mom had largely washed her hands of him. That was the problem with being found out as a good liar—people couldn’t trust that Eli was telling the truth rather than telling a good lie in a true-sounding way.