The girl who changed my life walked into my bookstore on a Tuesday afternoon, carrying everything she owned in a torn backpack and my son’s face.

Outside, the November wind off the Hudson River bit straight through coats and bones. Main Street in our little town in upstate New York looked like a movie set after the director yelled cut—empty sidewalks, a pickup rolling past, the flag in front of the post office snapping in the cold. Inside Williams Books, it was warmer but still had that old-building chill the heater never could chase from the corners. The radiator hissed and clanged like it was arguing with winter.

I was behind the counter, trying to make the numbers in my ledger behave like they cared whether I lived or died.

They didn’t.

Ink on paper is honest in a way people rarely are. The columns stared up at me: rent, utilities, wholesale invoices, taxes. The register totals from the past few weeks looked thin and embarrassed. I ran the sums again, even though I already knew what they said: forty years after my husband Paul and I opened this little independent bookstore in a small American town most people will never see on a map, we were one bad month away from real trouble.

The bell above the door jingled.

I didn’t look up right away. “Welcome in,” I called, automatic, the way people say “Bless you” when someone sneezes at the grocery store.

Silence answered me.

There it was—the small pause that told me this wasn’t a regular customer looking for the new mystery novel everyone on book talk was raving about. The air changed. The cold from outside rode in with whoever had opened the door. I felt it reach all the way to the counter.

When I finally lifted my head, she was standing just inside the doorway, one step past the threshold like she wasn’t sure she was allowed any further.

She was young. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Too thin in the way that said it wasn’t genetics or soccer practice, but skipped meals and cheap food. Her jeans were dirty at the knees, her sneakers scuffed almost white at the toes. The jacket swallowing her was two sizes too big, sleeves falling over her hands, the kind of thing you get from a donation bin because the price is right, not because it fits.

Her backpack hung off one shoulder, seams starting to fray. That backpack looked like it had been on more buses and shelter floors than any teenager should know about.

She wasn’t pretty in that polished, Instagram-filter way. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, the elastic stretched out. But her face—

Something in my chest jumped, then went very, very still.

There was something familiar in the angle of her jaw, the shape of her mouth when she pressed her lips together like she was bracing for bad news. It was like catching my reflection in a window and seeing someone else behind me for a split second. A flicker. A ghost.

She stood there for a moment, taking it all in. The tall shelves crammed with hardcovers and paperbacks, the “Local Authors” table by the front window, the little hand-painted sign that said WILLIAMS BOOKS – EST. 1983 – HUDSON FALLS, NY. Her gaze moved in slow, careful sweeps, not the casual glance of a bored kid, but like she was cataloging the room.

She looked like a stray animal deciding if the open door meant food or a trap.

I dropped my eyes back to the ledger to give her space. People came in off the street sometimes just to warm up, especially in winter. I understood that. I’d rather have them wandering my aisles than trying to sleep on the benches by the river.

Still, I kept her in my peripheral vision.

She drifted toward the young adult section like a compass finding north. Her fingers brushed the spines as she walked—soft, reverent, like she was saying hello. She pulled out a book, opened it right there in the aisle, and began reading the first page, lips moving slightly.

A reader, then.

That counted for something in my world.

She didn’t pretend to browse, didn’t pick up her phone every few seconds. She wasn’t killing time; she was using it. After a few minutes, she carried the book over to the poetry corner—our back-left nook where the light from the street fell best in the afternoons—and set it on the small table like she was saving a seat.

Interesting.

She moved like someone who was tired all the way down inside, but holding herself up out of pure stubbornness. I recognized that kind of exhaustion. I’d been carrying it ever since Paul’s heart stopped in our bed two years before, on an ordinary Thursday morning that split my life in half.

Fifteen, twenty minutes passed, maybe more. She circled back to the poetry table, picked up the book she’d claimed, held it to her chest, then walked slowly toward the counter.

She stopped a few feet away and cleared her throat.

“Excuse me,” she said.

Her voice was quiet, careful. Every instinct in me that had sharpened from years as a mother and then years of being alone, listening for trouble in the apartment upstairs, tuned itself to that one small sound.

I looked up fully. Up close, the familiarity hit me harder—the set of her eyes, the slope of her nose. A shadow of a face I knew so well I’d held it the day it came into the world.

“Yes?” I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

She swallowed. “Are you hiring?”

There it was. The ask.

She shifted from one foot to the other, the book still pressed to her chest like a shield. “I— I need work,” she said. “I’m good with books. I—I can learn fast. I promise.”

I set my pen down on the ledger. The numbers could wait. The girl could not.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen.” The word came quick, rehearsed, like she’d had to say it and defend it before. “I know I’m young, but I work hard. I can prove it.”

Sixteen. Young, but not a child. Old enough to have seen more of the world than I wanted to think about, standing there with a frayed backpack and a jacket that wasn’t hers.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She hesitated just a breath. “Jennifer. Jennifer Carter.”

Carter.

The name slid through my mind like a finger along a dusty shelf. At first, nothing. Then something shifted.

Carter.

I’d heard that name before.

“Where are you staying, Jennifer?” I asked, my voice gentle.

She looked down at the floor. “There’s a shelter a couple blocks over, on Maple,” she said. “Been staying there a few weeks.”

Two blocks from my store, and I’d never seen her before. That said something. Homeless kids didn’t usually walk into bookstores.

“You’re not from Hudson Falls?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, ma’am. Upstate. Further north.” She waved vaguely. “Small town. You wouldn’t know it.”

“Family here?” I asked.

The question was automatic, the way doctors ask “Any allergies?” It’s not the question that matters; it’s the way people answer.

She was quiet long enough that I almost apologized.

“My mom died when I was twelve,” she said finally. “And my—” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice had that faraway, practiced tone people use when they’re reading court statements or telling you how the car accident happened. “My dad died before I was born. That’s what my mom told me.”

She didn’t look up when she said it. Just stared at the counter, fingers tightening on the book she hadn’t tried to buy. Her shoulders tightened, then relaxed. She’d said those words before. They’d worn grooves in her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.

She nodded. “Thank you.”

The heater hissed behind me. Outside, a gust of wind rattled the front window. The world kept spinning while the floor shifted under my feet.

“What was your mother’s name?” I asked, careful, like I was picking up a fragile glass I might drop.

“Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Carter.”

The air left my lungs.

The bookstore fell away. The shelves blurred. For a second, all I could see was another girl standing by the poetry section years earlier, dark hair pulled back, laughing as she tried to read Pablo Neruda to a twenty-one-year-old version of my son who pretended to hate poetry and secretly loved the way she pronounced the words.

Amanda Carter.

She’d come into the store almost every day that summer. Sat cross-legged in the corner with Chris, sharing headphones, sharing paperbacks, sharing that intense, bright love only people in their early twenties think will last forever. I’d brought them iced tea sometimes, pretended not to listen when she read to him.

Then she stopped coming.

I asked Chris about her once, when he swung by three weeks later to grab his mail and complain about how slow our Wi-Fi was. He shrugged. “We broke up,” he said. “She went back to her hometown. It’s fine.”

He’d said it with that breezy, dismissive tone he used on most of his life, and I, idiot that I was, believed him.

I never saw Amanda again.

Until now.

This Jennifer—sixteen years old, mother named Amanda Carter, no father, standing in my bookstore two blocks from a homeless shelter in a small upstate New York town—that was coincidence stacked on coincidence. Then there was her face.

Up close, it was like looking at a faded photograph of my son at seventeen. Not an exact copy. Softer. Warmer around the eyes. But the bone structure was pure Chris.

My heart began to pound so loud I was sure she could hear it.

I needed to think. To breathe. To not jump from instinct to accusation in one wild leap.

“Can I ask you something?” Jennifer said suddenly, breaking my spinning thoughts.

“Of course,” I said.

“Do you really have a job,” she asked, “or were you just being nice?”

The hope in her voice was so thin it was almost invisible. Hope stretched that tight can snap and cut both of you.

In that moment, whatever questions I had about DNA and timelines and Amanda’s mysterious disappearance dropped behind something more urgent: this sixteen-year-old girl who needed work, warmth, and one person on earth to say yes.

I made my decision.

“I have a job,” I said. “You’re hired. If you want it.”

She stared at me. The whole world seemed to pour into that look—hunger, exhaustion, disbelief, a lifetime of “no” colliding with one unexpected “yes.”

“Really?” she whispered.

“Really,” I said. “Can you start tomorrow at nine?”

“I—” She blinked. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you love books,” I said. “That’s enough for now.”

She was shaking, just a little, like her body was trying to catch up to the news. “I don’t have references,” she said quickly. “Or a resume. Or—”

“That’s fine,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I can work mornings, afternoons, whatever you need. I can—”

“How about we start with mornings,” I said, “and see where we land?”

I walked around the counter. Up close, I could see the dark circles under her eyes, the chapped skin on her knuckles. She smelled faintly of cold air and cheap soap. The shelter, probably.

“There’s a couch in the back office,” I said. “It’s not much, but it’s warmer than the shelter. If you need a place to sleep for a while, you can use it.”

She froze. “I can’t pay you rent or anything. I don’t—”

“You’ll be working,” I said. “That’s payment enough.”

Her eyes filled so fast she didn’t have time to hide it. She blinked hard, swiped at the tears with the back of her hand like she was mad at them for appearing.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. “I won’t let you down. I promise.”

“I believe you,” I said.

She nodded, clutching the book against her like a life vest. “Nine o’clock tomorrow,” I reminded her.

“Nine,” she repeated.

She turned to go, made it all the way to the door, then stopped.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked without looking back. “You don’t know me.”

I looked at her small figure in that oversized jacket, framed in the doorway of the store Paul and I had built with our bare hands when we were barely older than my son had been that summer with Amanda.

“Because you asked,” I said. “And I have a job that needs doing.”

She swallowed. Nodded. Then she stepped out into the cold November afternoon on Main Street, the wind grabbing the door behind her and blowing in one more gust of winter as she left.

I stood in the quiet store, hand still on the counter, heart racing like I’d run up the hill to the high school.

Amanda Carter had a daughter.

And that daughter had just walked into my bookstore and asked me for a job.

I sat down slowly in the chair behind the counter, the old wood creaking like it always did. In front of me, the ledger lay open, numbers still bad, ink still unforgiving. But the math that mattered suddenly looked very different.

Chris had dated Amanda seventeen years ago. Maybe sixteen. They’d spent that whole summer tangled together in my aisles, whispering plans and poems and future-tense verbs. Jennifer was sixteen now.

Sixteen years. Amanda’s daughter. And that face.

It could be coincidence.

Or it could be the beginning of everything.

That night, after closing, I flipped the sign to CLOSED, shut off the front lights, and climbed the narrow back stairs up to the apartment above the store. The place smelled like old books and coffee and the lemon cleaner I used on Saturdays like Paul had liked it.

Paul.

Two years earlier he’d gone to bed on a Wednesday night with a sore back and a to-do list for the morning and never woken up.

I’d woken up, though. I’d woken up to a silence so loud it took my hearing with it for a while. The paramedics came. The coroner. The funeral home. People brought casseroles and sympathy cards and told me, “At least he didn’t suffer.” As if that helped.

It didn’t.

After he died, the apartment felt like an empty stage set. His favorite mug sat in the sink for three weeks because I couldn’t bring myself to wash it. His jacket hung on the back of a chair until the first snowfall, when I finally put it in the closet and shut the door like that could hide the fact that there was no one to wear it.

Chris had come up from New York City for the funeral. He stood in the back of the small town funeral home in his expensive suit, eyes on his phone half the time, jaw tight like grief was an inconvenience he’d been forced to schedule. We barely spoke.

Three months later, he’d walked into the bookstore with a manila folder and a gleam in his eye.

“Mom, I’ve got something big,” he’d said. “Subscription boxes for young professionals. Curated products. It’s going to be huge. I just need capital to start.”

He needed $350,000.

“Sell the store,” he’d said. “Hudson Falls is dying. No one buys physical books anymore. Take the money, retire, invest in my company. It’s a win-win.”

“This store is all I have left of your father,” I’d said, hands shaking.

“It’s a building, Mom. It’s inventory. It’s not Dad.”

“I’m not selling,” I’d told him, the words small but firm.

His face had gone hard in a way I didn’t recognize. “So you’re choosing dusty books over your own son’s future,” he’d said. “Got it.”

“Chris, that’s not fair—”

“Forget it,” he’d snapped, grabbing his coat. “Don’t expect me to stand here and watch you throw your life away on this place. I’m done.”

He’d walked out that afternoon and, for two years, that was that. No calls. No visits. No “Merry Christmas, Mom” texts. Nothing.

The son I’d carried for nine months, the boy who’d taken his first steps between these shelves, had cut me out of his life as cleanly as a knife.

So, yes. I knew something about abandonment. About being left behind like a book nobody bothered to pick up.

Jennifer did, too. That much was clear.

After she left that first day, I sat alone in the apartment, the TV off, a cup of tea growing cold in my hands, and thought about what would happen if my wild, gut-deep suspicion was right.

Tomorrow, she’d come back.

Tomorrow, I could start asking questions. Careful ones. Tomorrow, I could begin to find out if the girl sleeping two blocks away in a shelter was my granddaughter.

In the morning, she showed up at eight forty-five.

I was just unlocking the front door when I saw her coming down the sidewalk, breath clouding in the icy air, that same battered backpack on her shoulder. Different jacket, but just as big. Someone had given her another hand-me-down.

“You’re early,” I said, holding the door open as she reached the step.

“I didn’t want to be late,” she said, slightly out of breath. “If you changed your mind, I figured at least I’d know early.”

“I didn’t change my mind,” I said. “Come on in.”

The store always looked different in the morning. Light from the east poured through the big front windows, catching dust motes in the air, turning them into tiny floating planets. The bell chimed once as I closed the door behind us. The place smelled like coffee and paper and possibility.

“Have you had breakfast?” I asked.

She hesitated. “I’m fine.”

Which meant no.

“There’s a coffee shop next door,” I said. “Marco’s. Go over and get yourself a coffee and something to eat. Tell Marco to put it on Linda’s tab.”

“I don’t need—”

“You can’t work on an empty stomach,” I said. “Go. I’ll be here when you get back.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, then clearly decided she didn’t want to risk it. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

While she was gone, I cleared the boxes off the couch in the back office. The couch had seen better days; the cushions sagged in the middle like it was tired too. But it was clean. I found an extra blanket in the storage closet and a pillow that smelled faintly of mothballs and lavender.

By the time she came back, careful not to spill the coffee in the paper cup, I’d cleared enough space for her to sleep without having to curl up like a question mark.

“I’ll pay you back when I get my first paycheck,” she said, setting the muffin down on the counter.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

All morning, I trained her.

I showed her how the register worked, how our sections were laid out—fiction alphabetical by author, non-fiction by subject, local history by the front window because tourists from downstate loved to collect stories about old mills and forgotten river towns. I showed her where we kept the bookmarks, the paper bags, the gift wrap we offered free at Christmas.

She learned fast. Faster than most high school kids I’d hired over the years. She asked smart questions and wrote the answers down in a small beat-up notebook she pulled from her backpack.

“Do you get a lot of customers?” she asked at one point, leaning on the counter between customers.

“Not like we used to,” I said. “The internet changed everything. People buy books online now, mostly. Free shipping is hard to compete with.”

“That’s sad,” she said, genuinely. Her fingers ran along the glossy covers of the new releases near the register. “You can’t get this feeling from a screen.”

I liked her more with every passing hour.

By noon, I trusted her enough to let her work the register while I went to the back to tackle inventory. I peeked out through the doorway more than once. She was polite with customers, not overly chatty, but engaged, really listening when they described what they liked. When a woman came in looking for something “for a teenage daughter who hates everything,” Jennifer tilted her head, thought for a moment, then put three books on the counter, explaining what she loved about each. The woman bought all three.

During a slow stretch in the afternoon, I walked out from the back and found Jennifer sitting cross-legged on the floor in the poetry section, notebook open on her lap, pen hovering over the page.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

She jumped, closing the notebook instinctively. “Nothing. Just—” She hesitated. “Stories. I guess.”

“You write,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Sort of,” she said. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” I said. “Books saved my life more than once. Writing them is just another way of staying alive.”

Her eyes flicked up to mine, surprised.

“Books were kind of my friends when I was younger,” she said slowly. “When things got bad at home, I’d hide in my room and read.”

“What happened at home?” I asked gently, sitting down on the little step stool near her.

She picked at the edge of the notebook, the pages softened from use. It took her a long moment to answer.

“My mom had… problems,” she said finally. “She started using… stuff, after I was born. At least that’s what my aunt told me once.”

Drugs, I translated silently. Addiction. The word didn’t need to be said to be present in the air.

“I don’t really remember a time before that,” she went on. “I remember being little and finding her on the couch, passed out. Or in the bathroom. I got good at… you know, making excuses for her. Hiding things from the neighbors so they wouldn’t call anyone.”

“That’s a lot for a kid to handle,” I said.

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said simply. “Somebody had to lock the door. Somebody had to make sure there was food.”

“How old were you when she… when she passed away?” I asked.

“Twelve,” Jennifer said. “I came home from school one day and she was in the bathroom. I called 911, but… it was too late.”

My chest tightened. I could see her, a twelve-year-old girl in a cheap house in some forgotten town, phone shaking in her hand, talking to a stranger’s calm voice while her mother’s body lay on a cold tile floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, and again, the words felt too small.

“It was four years ago,” she said, shrugging like she was pushing the weight off her shoulders. “After that, it was foster homes. Then the group home. Then the orphanage.”

“How did you end up here?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “Last year, I turned fifteen and I realized no one was going to come rescue me. The group home was… bad. Not like movie bad. Just—cold. No one cared. We were just numbers. So I left. Took a bus as far as my money would go. Been on my own ever since.”

“On the streets?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper.

“Mostly shelters,” she said. “Sometimes parks. Sometimes church basements. You figure out quickly where it’s safe and where people notice if you stop coming back.”

She said it like she was describing bus routes, not survival. But the way her fingers gripped the notebook told the real story.

I understood loss. I understood loneliness that sat with you at breakfast and crawled into bed with you at night. Listening to her, I felt something in me click into place.

That night, after she fell asleep on the couch in the back office under the faded quilt I’d laid out for her, I sat upstairs at the kitchen table with my laptop open and my glasses sliding down my nose.

Paul would have loved her, I thought suddenly. The way she touched the books. The way she took everything in and filed it away.

On the laptop screen, under the glow of the little ceramic lamp shaped like a stack of books, I typed “DNA ancestry test kit” into the search bar.

It was the only way to know for sure.

I found a company I recognized from commercials on daytime TV. Their website was friendly and non-threatening, all smiling families and maps of Europe. I ordered two kits.

Three days later, the small cardboard boxes arrived with the mail. I brought them downstairs, feeling like I was carrying a bomb that only I knew about.

“Hey,” I said casually. “I got something weird in the mail.”

Jennifer looked up from where she was restocking the young adult fantasy shelf. “Yeah?”

I held up the kits. “DNA ancestry tests,” I said. “I read a book about genetics a few weeks ago, got curious about my family history. I accidentally ordered two. Do you want to do one with me?”

She stared at the box like I’d handed her a ticket to someplace she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

“I don’t really know anything about my family,” she said. “Just my mom. And she didn’t talk about them.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Sometimes these things show cousins and aunts you never knew you had. It might be fun. Or at least interesting.”

She hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” she said. “Not like I’ve got a better mystery to solve today.”

We opened the kits at the counter. I read the instructions aloud. It was simple: swab, seal, mail.

“This is it?” she asked, dropping her used swab into the little plastic tube.

“That’s it,” I said. “Science is shockingly simple sometimes.”

We sealed the boxes, bundled them up, and walked together down to the little brick post office on Elm Street. The air outside smelled like snow that hadn’t fallen yet. Jennifer dropped the packages into the mail slot like we were sending something precious and alive.

“How long does it take?” she asked as we walked back, our breath fogging in the cold air.

“Three weeks. Maybe four,” I said.

She made a face. “That’s a long time.”

“Good things take time,” I said.

She gave me the first real smile I’d seen on her face. It transformed her, made the resemblance to Chris both sharper and somehow less painful.

Three weeks. That’s what the website had said.

It might as well have been three years.

Every day after that, we settled into a rhythm.

Every morning, she came through the back door a little before nine with two coffees in a cardboard tray from Marco’s. Eventually Marco stopped charging me for one of them. “For the kid,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “She reminds me of my niece.”

Jennifer insisted on paying him back out of her own wages anyway.

“When I’m rich and famous, I’ll buy your whole coffee shop,” she told him once.

“I’ll hold you to that,” he said, laughing.

In the store, she took ownership of things quickly. The young adult section was her first project. “It should be near the front,” she said one slow afternoon, sliding books around in neat stacks. “If teens see it from the window, they’ll actually come in. Right now it looks like this place is just for old people.”

“Hey,” I said, pretending offense.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Grown-ups.”

We spent two days moving shelves, swapping categories, creating a display in the big front window with fairy lights and hand-lettered signs she made in blue marker. Within days, kids from the high school started wandering in on their way home, drawn by the covers they recognized from TikTok.

“You’re good at this,” I told her.

“I just know what I would’ve wanted when I was younger,” she said. “A place that felt like it was for me.”

On Wednesdays, when business was slowest, she sat in the poetry corner on her break, back against the shelf, notebook open.

“Find anything good?” I asked one afternoon, wiping down the front counter with a rag.

She held up a dog-eared collection of Mary Oliver poems. “My mom used to read poetry,” she said quietly. “Back when things were… better. Before.”

“What was she like before?” I asked.

Jennifer’s face softened. “She was good,” she said. “Really good. She’d read to me with all these goofy voices, like I was five even when I was older. She loved books. Almost as much as I do.”

“Almost, huh?” I said.

“I might love them more,” she said with the tiniest grin.

“What changed?” I asked gently. “With her?”

Jennifer ran a finger along the page, tracing a line like she was following a thought. “I think she was sad,” she said. “Her parents kicked her out when she got pregnant with me. She was only twenty. She tried to make it work, but… I don’t think she ever stopped being heartbroken about… everything.”

“Twenty,” I repeated softly. Chris had been twenty-one that summer. Amanda would’ve been around that age.

“By the time I was five or six, I started finding… stuff,” Jennifer said. “Needles. Bottles. Things I didn’t understand. By ten, I was the one making sure she ate something, that we had toilet paper, that the rent was sort of paid.”

“That’s not your job,” I said.

She shrugged. “It was. It shouldn’t have been, but it was.”

“Did she know who your father was?” I asked, forcing the question out casually.

“She never told me his name,” Jennifer said. “Just that he was ‘long gone’ and that he was ‘better off not knowing.’ Sometimes when she’d had a good day, she’d say he was dead. Other times she’d say he didn’t exist. Like she couldn’t decide which hurt less.”

“Do you ever wonder about him?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Mostly when I was younger. I’d make up stories where he was a firefighter or a rock star or a guy who owned a bookstore and just didn’t know how to find me.”

“Why a bookstore?” I asked, my throat tight.

She smiled faintly. “Books were the only place I saw dads who stuck around,” she said. “So I decided mine had to be hiding in a library somewhere.”

She reached into her backpack then, pulled out a small, battered poetry book. The cover was tape and hope. The pages were yellowed, the corners bent.

“She gave me this when I was eleven,” Jennifer said, handing it to me carefully. “Told me to keep it safe. It’s the only thing I have from her.”

Inside the front cover, in faded ink, were the words: For my Jennifer — love finds a way. Mom.

My eyes stung.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, handing it back.

“Sometimes I read it out loud and try to remember her voice,” Jennifer said. “When she was having a good day, her voice made words sound like music.”

“Is that why you write?” I asked. “To remember her?”

“Kind of,” she said, sliding the book back into her backpack. “I write the version of her I wish I’d had. The mom who got clean and stayed that way. The mom who took care of me instead of the other way around. It’s stupid.”

“It’s survival,” I said.

She looked at me, really looked, and nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s exactly what it is.”

The second week, she started asking about my life.

“You’ve always lived here?” she asked as we counted the till one night.

“Pretty much,” I said. “Grew up an hour south. Moved here when Paul and I bought the building. Back then, this street was all small businesses. Hardware store, diner, barber, movie theater. You could buy everything you needed without leaving Main Street. Now half of it is empty storefronts and one chain pharmacy.”

“You and Paul owned this place together?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “We opened in eighty-three. Reagan was president, MTV played music videos, and we were stupid enough to think a bookstore was a good way to make a living.”

“Did you love it?” she asked.

“I loved him,” I said. “The store was part of that. Every shelf, every squeaky floorboard, every coffee stain on the counter is ours. Was ours.”

She waited.

“He died two years ago,” I said. “Heart attack. In his sleep. If you’re going to go, that’s the way. But I still wanted to kill him for leaving me alone.”

Jennifer nodded. She understood the irrational math of grief.

“Do you have kids?” she asked.

“One,” I said. “A son. Chris.”

She brightened. “Oh. Where does he live?”

“New York City,” I said. “Somewhere between Brooklyn and the moon, judging by how busy he says he is.”

“Does he ever visit?” she asked.

“Not lately,” I said, keeping my tone even. “We… had a fight.”

“What about?” she asked cautiously.

I told her. About the subscription box idea. About the $350,000. About him wanting me to sell the store. About me refusing. About the way he’d walked out like I’d chosen the wrong answer on a quiz show and he was done watching.

“That’s awful,” she said.

“He has a right to chase his dreams,” I said. “I have a right to keep mine. Sometimes those two rights collide.”

“Have you talked since?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Two years.”

“So you were alone,” she said quietly. “Until I walked in.”

The truth of that hit me harder than I expected. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I was.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked suddenly. “For me? I mean, the job, the couch. Most people would’ve told me to leave.”

I put the last twenty-dollar bill into the deposit bag and looked at her. “Do you want the honest answer?” I asked.

“Always,” she said.

“I was drowning in quiet,” I said. “This store felt too big, the apartment too empty. You walked in and reminded me what this place is supposed to be.”

“A fire hazard full of paper?” she said, but there was a smile lurking.

“A place where people who love books can find each other,” I said.

Her eyes shone. She blinked. “I keep waiting for you to change your mind,” she admitted. “Tell me to leave.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said.

“People always leave,” she said. “Or I do. That’s how it works.”

“Not this time,” I said.

By the end of the third week, I was checking the DNA company’s website three times a day.

The email came on a Monday morning.

I was at the counter, flipping through the distributor’s spring catalog, when my phone pinged. New email: Your DNA results are ready.

My hands went cold.

“Jennifer,” I called, my voice sounding strange in my own ears.

She appeared from the back, carrying a stack of paperbacks.

“Yeah?” she said.

“The DNA results are in,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “Already?”

“Three weeks and two days,” I said, because of course I’d been counting. “Come here.”

We stood shoulder to shoulder behind the counter while I opened the laptop and logged in to my account. The Wi-Fi in the old building took its time. The little spinning wheel felt like it was mocking me.

Then the screen loaded.

A family tree graphic popped up. Relatives. Matches. Names.

Right at the top of the “Close Family” section, under my own name, was another.

Jennifer Carter – Predicted Relationship: Granddaughter – High Confidence.

“Grandmother match,” Jennifer read aloud. Her forehead creased. “I don’t understand.”

I took a breath so deep it hurt. “I have a son,” I said carefully. “His name is Chris Williams. He’s thirty-eight. Seventeen years ago, he dated a girl named Amanda Carter. That summer, she used to come here, to this store, to meet him.”

Jennifer’s mouth parted.

“One day she stopped coming,” I went on. “Chris said they’d broken up, that she’d gone back to her hometown. I never saw her again.”

She stared at me like she was trying to see the truth under my skin.

“Your mother was Amanda Carter,” I said. “You’re sixteen. Amanda was about twenty when she dated my son. The timeline fits. And now the DNA says you and I are… family.”

She looked back at the screen.

“I have a father,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “You do. He’s alive. He lives in New York City.”

Her eyes filled. “My mom said he was dead,” she said, voice trembling. “She told me that over and over.”

“She probably