The Bookstore Wedding (The Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories)

Love makes you do unexpected things. It’s never what you think it will be. It can break your heart or it can save you when you least expect it to, which was certainly true for Isabel Gibson. She had vowed never to come home again, but just like people said, she’d finally come back from New York after twelve years in exile. Now she was here to stay, and it was clear to everyone, love was the reason.

When the Gibson sisters were girls, they’d promised their father they’d take over his beloved Once upon a Time Bookshop, vowing that nothing would ever change. Fiction would always be on tables up front, nonfiction would be near the window, and children’s books would line the shelves of the fairy-tale room. But everything changed when the girls’ mother died, and after that the shelves were always dusty and the books were a hodgepodge and Isabel decided the last thing she wanted was to spend her life in a bookstore. Isabel was only ten in that terrible year, but that was when she stopped believing in fairy tales. Her father came home from the hospital every day during that last sorrowful month of their mother’s life and he’d locked himself away to weep. That was when Isabel decided that love was dangerous. It made you weak and left you at the mercy of fate. That was when she stopped going out to the marshes with her best friend, Johnny Lenox. She already knew she would fall in love with him, and she’d decided to stop it before it had begun. She was never going to lock herself away and cry. She was never going to lose what mattered most, not if nothing mattered at all.

Even then, Isabel dreamed of escaping to New York. She wanted a city where no one was fazed if they spied someone crying on a street corner, a place where no one knew your name. She wanted to be free, without connections that would tie her down and only hurt her in the end. After her mother’s death, she would sit in the marsh with paper and ink and create cloudy images of avenues and buildings she’d never seen. At seventeen, she made a list of everything on the island she had loved most of all: her mother; her father; the bookstore; her sister, Sophie; and Johnny Lenox, to whom she no longer spoke, even though he did his best to follow her around, sometimes appearing in their garden early in the morning, so that she had to close her curtains so she wouldn’t see him out there waiting for her. Isabel took the list she’d made and set it on fire, watching it burn in the kitchen sink. By the time she ran the water, there was nothing left but black ash.

As soon as she graduated, she packed her bags. She ignored Johnny, who had trailed her down to the docks. Don’t follow me anymore, Isabel told him. Don’t you get it? There’s nothing between us. She didn’t hear what he shouted back to her as the boat left the island. The wind was too high, and, anyway, at that point Isabel had already turned away.