Script quote and books on a foot

After that they wrote to each other through the returns shelf. Ruth was a retired typesetter with firm opinions about kerning and firmer ones about endings. She wrote that she tried to read conscientiously, and only believed what an author had earned the right to say. Dev, who baked nights at the bakery across the road and read on his break with flour on the spines, answered that he followed ardently any book with a lighthouse or a missing glove in it. Kindred spirits, he signed off, and she teased him for it in the next margin.

By autumn the notes had grown too long for the margins and moved into envelopes tucked between the pages like bookmarks. Ruth stopped signing her name. Dev stopped asking for it. When the shop closed for its winter refit, the owner, a patient man called Oyelaran, boxed up the unclaimed returns and sent them to the church hall sale.

Ruth found the box on a wet Saturday. Among the paperbacks sat a copy of the lighthouse novel, and tucked inside the back cover was a single line in blue biro: Same shelf, first Tuesday of spring? She paid a pound for it, took it home, and wrote her answer on the flyleaf before she had finished the first chapter.