It was Paige. "Hey there. Did you have time to get a shower after I dropped you off at your car? Or would you like me to hold down the fort while you run home?"

All I could do was fling out my arms and say, "Look!"

Paige looked around. "That's funny. I thought I straightened all these shelves up the other day."

I'm afraid I sounded hysterical. "They're not messy! They're cleaned out! Books are gone! Just missing!"

She looked around, then looked me straight in the eye and said, "Well, that's weird."

"Weird? It's a catastrophe!" I gasped for breath. "Upstairs it's – ninety percent of them are gone. Just a small stack left. And a huge charred mark on the floor."

"Hey." Paige snapped her fingers. "I sorted out those Ex Libris books yesterday from the ones that didn't have the stamp – remember, I thought I needed to stamp them? I'll bet it's those Ex Libris books that are gone." She started picking books off the shelves at random, flipping to the title pages. "No – No – "

I did the same thing, numbly. And two minutes later Paige said, "I'll bet that's it. I bet you could go though this whole store and not find one book with that stamp on it."

"You did this!"

"Me? Why would I?"

"You were putting stuff on your books at home!" I must have sounded like an absolute madwoman. "You tell me! Why did you? Why would anyone else?"

Paige spoke more seriously and earnestly than I'd ever heard her speak. "OK. First of all, Eileen, I know we haven't known each other forever, but you should at least know by now that I would never, never do anything to hurt you. Do you understand me?"

I caught my breath and, after a moment, nodded.

"Now, who would do it. I don't know. But it strikes me that anyone who's weird enough to drive a U-Haul up to a bookstore and dump 6,000 books there is weird enough to jimmy an old lock and take them back."

"Dalayna herself? Picking her books carefully out from all the others? Leaving scorch marks all over?"

Paige shrugged. "How did you describe her? A goth business exec? Didn't give you her full name and left before you could give her a receipt? Sounds like weirdness to spare. I think we're lucky she didn't just burn down the whole store."

I felt a little calmer, but when I sighed I could hear the shaking in my own breath. "'Lucky.' Almost half my inventory is gone. Oh, well. That much less to get rid of when the store closes."

"You want to close it?"

And the funny thing was, when she asked it, I felt some inner fight in me that I haven't felt in months. Some sort of burden, it felt like, had dropped off me.

"No. I don't want to. But what else can I do? I've got one dependable employee, no customer base, and about half a store of product."

"OK, so you sell romance novels out of half the store. And in the other half – "

"Fitness classes?"

"You sell occult stuff. The way you were planning to before you chickened out. I'm sorry, made the financially sensible decision."

My heart soared, the instant that she said it, but I had to make the arguments. "It would never work. Two entirely different clientele. Braless grad students mixing with suburban mommies."

"Hey, you said yourself yesterday, all kinds buy romance novels. And I know suburban mommies who are into Wicca."

"I would need to get so much."

"I have friends who supply stuff like that. You can get it at a discount."

I turned slowly, looking around.

"Next objection?" Paige said.

"If we accented the positive aspects," I said. "And the romantic aspects. Love amulets. Crystals in the counter. Display them on white satin. Burn pink scented candles – if we can keep them going – "

"Bet we can now," Paige said, almost to herself.

"Fantasy and supernatural romances over there, transition between the two halves of the store. Not death's heads or black crepe. A celebration of personal power, personal magic."

"Well, maybe a little black," Paige said. "You don't want to leave out mystery."

"No. You're right. Magic and mystery." I looked around and we met each other's eyes. "Romance."

Paige nodded with her little sideways smile.

"Lot of work," I said.

"I'll be here," she said. "Uh, except not right now. Speaking of love reminded me. I'm going to make a phone call."

She started for the door and I said, "Tell Luisa hello for me."

She stopped and looked around at me.

"You knew, didn't you? You didn't come here because of a help-wanted sign in the window. You knew Luisa was a regular here, and when she called off herwedding for no reason you decided, somehow, that it had something to do with the store. That there was something wrong with the books, something wrong with me."

She walked back to me and, in the middle of the store in the middle of the morning in front of the uncovered windows, wrapped me in her arms and kissed me.

"Not with you," she said. "Nothing wrong with you at all."

That was all I could get out of her on the subject today. And my guess is, that's all I'll ever get out of her.

The question that I'd really like to ask I can't, because I was drunk enough that she could dismiss it with a laugh. But I remember now how she made a point of dropping her robe on the crate that the books were sitting on after we came down from the attic at her house. And I wonder now, if I'd lifted that robe, would I have seen five books and a crystal? Or a crystal sitting on one book and a scorched crate?

So here I am, facing the end of the bookstore as I know it, preparing to turn it into this strange hybrid creature, more excited and more optimistic than I've felt in months. In some ways, maybe ever.

September 14, 2002

Grand opening tonight, way too tired to go into the details, just that it was very well attended. A midnight gala on Friday the 13th was appropriate, but I have to admit I secretly wondered if I was tempting fate. But Paige's friends turned out, and we got a surprising percentage from the store's mailing list, enough to keep both Carl and Wanda busy. They're neither of them as efficient as Paige was yet, but they're getting there. And in spite of what Paige said last week, it is such a load off my conscience that our relationship is now strictly personal.

Piper and Leo came in – Piper's still not showing, she's going to be one of those who hardly shows at all until the final couple of months and then blows up like a zeppelin. She got a romance novel and told me unconvincingly that it was for a friend of hers. One of my favorite moments of the evening is Leo discoursing, in his earnest-hubby way, on the meanings of different crystals to a pair of haughty would-be vampires wearing black capes and black fingernails. I still can't figure out why such a personable and apparently able-bodied young man can't get steady work. But after that strange night when the Ex Libris books disappeared, and we began having a slow-but-steady upturn in business, I decided, and I suppose it's kind of cowardly of me, but I decided that the less I prod Paige about herself and her family, the less likely I am to learn something that would unsettle our relationship. Don't ask, don't tell, you might say.

Paige went back to the Manor with Piper and Leo. She needs her space, her own room, and I'm doing my best to understand. I knew she was a free spirit the moment she walked in the door, so I can't be surprised when she wants to be by herself. We'll be together tomorrow – I guess tonight, at this hour – and maybe Wednesday.

It's the long term that I don't know about. I know it's micromanaging of me to think about the future when we're just past the stage where we can't keep our hands off each other. But that's what I am, a micromanager. And let's face it, "opposites attract" works wonderfully in romance novels but, at least from what I've seen, it doesn't last that long in real life.

I love what Paige said the other day because it so perfectly characterizes her: "You never know what life is going to throw at you next. But that's what I like about it." The thing is, I don't want a whole lot of surprises out of life. I know what I want, now: Dinner at the same time every night. The same face on the pillow next to mine, every morning. Quiet weekends at wine country bed & breakfasts. Watching silver grow, strand by strand, into my lover's hair.

And that's not what Paige wants now, I know. She may want it someday. Or she may be one of those who runs off with someone else's significant other when she's 60 and gets arrested at a protest rally when she's 70.

But I wouldn't be so aware of our differences, because I wouldn't be able to admit what I want even in this journal, if it hadn't been for her. If I ever do have that long-term, committed, all right let's say it, marriage, I know who I'll have to thank for it.

And if she ever needs someone to put up bail money, she'll know who to call.