Page 86 of It'll Always Be Her
ChapterNineteen
So much for not getting attached.
Bee hauled an armful of books from the returns box and set them next to the computer. Though she couldn’t help feeling all light, airy, and downright happy after her night with Adam, a cloud still hovered at the back of her mind.
She’d had this kind of hope before, and never once had it blossomed into anything real. Something she could hold on to. Something that washers.
But this was different. This was Adam. And the wordlovekept nudging right up against every thought of him.
In fact, it had probably first appeared when they’d crashed into each other at his trailer, but since Bee wasn’t meant for One True Loveness—much less love at first mishap—she hadn’t recognized it.
Love. Like ghosts, dragons, magic mirrors, witches’ spells, and thousands of other mystical phenomena, Bee had read plenty of stories about love.
But while she’d had no trouble believing Middle Earth really existed somewhere or a wardrobe could be a portal into another world, she’d never truly believed that she might one day know love. She’d always been too scared. Letting herself love also meant setting herself up for loss.
So why was her heart softening and opening up? Why was it letting all these feelings in?
Because Adam is worth the risk,whispered the tiny voice.
And maybe she was too.
Puffalump studied her from his position between two stacks of books on the circulation desk. She tried to glare at him, then sighed and bent to kiss him between the ears.
“Don’t judge,” she reminded him. “If I’m making a big mistake, I’ll learn sooner rather than later.”
She was pretty sure few scenarios would teach her more about Adam than going with him to his parents’ anniversary party.
After setting the returns on the carts for reshelving, she checked the calendar. Joe from Metalworks was scheduled to stop by tomorrow to get more paint samples, and Bee remembered that she hadn’t yet looked for the library’s restoration records.
She asked Rebecca to keep an eye on the circulation desk, then climbed the stairs to the third floor, which was the least-used area of the library aside from the cupola.
The third-floor windows were small, letting in less sunlight, and the books looked sadly neglected. Even the air seemed dusty up here. The stacks held obscure history books and periodicals that Bee had wanted to weed out ever since Pearl retired.
Like most of her other projects, she hadn’t had the time to actually get it done. And the rows of shelves stuffed with years-old copies ofAntarctic ScienceandAdvances in Nutritionwere taking up space that they could use for better purposes.
Not to mention that most of the periodicals were digitized and online, so there wasn’t much of a good reason to keep so many physical copies on hand—except that the library’s Wi-Fi was so unreliable that she couldn’t guarantee her patrons would be able to access much of anything online.
She supposed that was why Pearl had kept all the old editions. At least people could get the information they needed, even without technology.
Bee squeezed into the very last row of stacks. The lighting was so bad that she pulled out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight to illuminate the shelves stuffed with bound reports, folders, document boxes, and ledgers.
A thick layer of dust coated all the surfaces. In Bee’s four years at the library, no one had ever asked to review the library’s records. Again, it seemed like a waste of space to keep all the physical copies, if the records could be digitized.
As much as Bee loved books, she did find research was much more efficient with a computerized search function. In her opinion, the fully searchable digital archives ofThe London Timesdating all the way back to 1785 was an achievement on par with the moon landing.
Squinting, she peered at the spines and labels of the library records, keeping an eye out for anything labeledpaintorrestoration.
Maybe the information would be in ledger or a receipt book. How far back did the records go, anyway? A long way, if the size of the collection was anything to judge by.
She went deeper into the stacks, following the line of books all the way to the wall where the shelf dead-ended. Her flashlight beam illuminated an unremarkable brown portfolio placed horizontally on a lower shelf, the leaves held together by a worn ribbon.
She started to pass it when something drew her to a halt. She propped her phone up on the opposite shelf, directing the flashlight beam toward her as she bent and pulled out the portfolio.
A small cloud of dust rose. She sneezed and wiped off the cover, then unfastened the ribbon and opened it.
Flowers. The loose-leaf pages were filled with lovely, colorful drawings of flowers, so intricate they might have been crafted with a botanist’s eye. But the beauty of the flowers far surpassed the scientific detail—the blossoms burst out of the pages in bright, vibrant purple, red, green, and yellow.
Bee’s heart bumped against her ribs. At the lower left-hand corner of every page, penciled in delicate handwriting, was the nameM. Pepper.