Midwinter's Eve: Chapter Ten
Anything can happen in the woods.
Eve had walked this stretch of town a hundred times. It was the kind of route she took without thinking, the kind where her feet seemed to remember each crack in the sidewalk before her eyes did. The air had that in-between quality again; not winter anymore, but not quite anything else. Trees were bare, but the light was softer than it had been a week earlier.
She wasn’t planning to stop anywhere. She was just walking. That was what she told herself. She needed the break from school and college prep and constantly thinking about what’s next. She needed the air. She needed a route that wasn’t a straight line from one responsibility to the next. That was the explanation she stuck to as she passed the florist and the bakery and the small café that always put out too many chairs even when the weather didn’t deserve it. She didn’t question why she chose this street over any other. It felt easy, and she let it be easy.
She was only a few steps from the bookstore before she realized she had slowed down. The window displayed a crooked stack of used hardcovers. Her hand was halfway to the door, as if her body had decided before her mind had caught up.
The bell chimed when she walked in. It wasn’t a cheerful sound. It was small and a little tired, but gentle in a way that fit the room. The air smelled a bit stale. Coffee someone had left too long on a burner. Dust that had settled into the cracks of old wood.
The owner sat behind the desk with a book open across their lap. They lifted their eyes in greeting and then went back to reading. Eve nodded back, just as quietly. That was part of what she liked about this place. It didn’t insist on anything.
She wandered without much direction, letting her fingers trail lightly over spines the way a person might let their hand skim along a railing without looking at it. She wasn’t hunting for anything. She wasn’t even pretending to. Each row had its own smell. The poetry section smelled a little sweeter. The science shelves always had the faintest trace of metal in the air, like cold coins. The children’s section felt warmer, though she could never tell if that was her imagination or the way the carpet absorbed light.
She passed under the soft glow of the birch without stopping. The tree rose from the floor like it had grown there long before any walls existed. Its bark peeled in pale curls, delicate as the edges of old book pages. A strand of lights was still wound through the branches. The bulbs had a slight hum. They cast a glow that wasn’t bright enough to warm anything, but bright enough to feel like the memory of warmth. She didn’t pause, though her eyes flicked toward it in passing. Her body noted it the way you note a familiar landmark on a route you’ve taken for years.
Her feet took her to the back of the store. To the shelves marked DRAMA. She didn’t think about the path. She just found herself standing there, facing the rows of titles with a stillness she didn’t question for a moment. She moved her gaze slowly across the spines until it landed.
Into the Woods.
Something in her expression changed before she had the chance to stop it. It wasn’t a smile at first. More like a softening, a small recognition she hadn’t expected. Then the corners of her mouth lifted in a way she felt rather than saw.
She reached for the play and pulled it free. It felt light. Worn. The kind of book that had been through many hands. She let it fall open naturally. The spine bent to a page that clearly had been visited often. A line near the bottom had a faint pencil underline.
She let her eyes take in the line. She didn’t laugh out loud, but something in her chest loosened the way it does when a song you forgot you loved finds you again, uninvited. It wasn’t about the meaning. It was about the familiarity. The odd comfort of repetition.
She closed the play and slid it back into place, aligning it neatly with the books beside it. Her fingers lingered a moment longer than they needed to. Then she turned toward the exit. One step. A second. She reached the edge of the aisle.
She stopped.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just a quiet halt. A moment where something inside her caught up with something her body had known for days. She breathed in, breathed out, and a small smirk began to pull at the corner of her mouth. It was subtle, but unmistakable. It felt like admitting something to herself without having to say it.
She turned around.
Her steps were sure as she walked back to the shelf. She reached out, took hold of the top of the book, and gently flipped it upside down. The title shifted, now leaning at an angle that made no sense, except that it did. She stepped back and looked at it, her smirk deepening into something warmer.
She walked out of the store without another pause as the bell chimed behind her.
Days later, Nicolas returned. He told himself he hadn’t meant to go back to the bookstore. He told himself that as he walked the same street he always walked, hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched a little against the early spring chill. Sunlight skimmed the tops of cars, glinted off puddles, and threw small reflections up onto brick walls in flashes that almost felt like movement.
He’d slept poorly the last few nights. Not because anything was wrong. If anything, nothing was wrong at all, and that felt strange. His mind had been sifting through that feeling the way you sift sand through your fingers, trying to understand its weight. He’d drifted between restlessness and something close to anticipation.
He reached the corner where the café sat, the one with tables always waiting for warmer weather. He paused without planning to, watching the steam from a customer’s cup curl into the air and vanish. He realized he’d stopped in a place he usually walked past. His feet pulled him forward again, but slower.
His mind drifted the way it did on long walks, slipping past thoughts he hadn’t fully looked at. There was something there, just out of focus.
He turned onto the block where the bookstore sat tucked between two taller buildings. The crooked sign was visible half a block away. The dim bulb above it wasn’t lit at this time of day, but he imagined it would be later. The thought made him smile for no reason he could justify.
He reached for the door before he’d decided to go in. The bell chimed when he stepped inside. The sound brushed against him with the same soft familiarity as last time. The warmth in the air gathered around him slowly, not quite enough to chase the chill from his coat but enough to settle into the edges of him.
Nicolas let his eyes move through the room. Dust danced quietly in the beams of light coming through the front window. Somewhere in the back, a floorboard creaked as if the building itself shifted in its sleep. The birch tree rose in the center of the store, white and solid and strangely grounding. The lights wrapped through its branches were steady, holding a quiet warmth. He found himself breathing a little deeper as he looked at it.
He wandered through the aisles without choosing a direction, letting his attention pull him where it wanted. It guided him to DRAMA, same as always. He reached the section and brushed his hand along the spines, taking in the textures before the titles. Starting here had become its own kind of comfort.
Suddenly his hand froze for a moment, just a breath.
Into the Woods.
Upside down.
It shouldn’t have meant anything. It was a book in a used shop. Books got nudged. People pulled them out and shoved them back in crooked. Gravity did strange things with time.
Still, the sight pulled a laugh from him before he could stop it. Soft. More breath than sound. Not disbelief or even amusement. It was in between, like being caught mid-step in a thought you didn’t know you were having.
He stepped closer, eyes tracing the spine, the reversed title. He shook his head. “Not this time,” he said under his breath. Not loud enough for anyone else to hear, but loud enough for the moment to hear itself.
He reached out and turned the book right-side up. It sat neatly in the row, innocent and perfectly ordinary now. He lifted it from the shelf, letting the pages fall open the way they liked to. He skimmed a page without taking in a single word.
He wasn’t thinking about the girl from the other day. He told himself that. He told himself he just liked this book. That this place had a good feel to it. That he needed a few quiet minutes in a world that seemed to move too fast everywhere else.
He slipped the play back into place. Aligned it carefully. More carefully than necessary.
As he stepped back, the birch caught the corner of his eye again. Light slid across its bark in a slow ribbon, catching on the curls of peeling wood. For a second, it looked almost like the tree was breathing. He blinked, and the moment passed.
He turned toward the door, the bell chimed again, and he stepped into the cool air outside. The brightness of the afternoon met him all at once. He felt quieter than when he’d come in, the way he did on rare days when his mind decided to give him a little space.
Eve had picked the seat under the birch because it was always the best place to work. The light there never felt harsh, and the branches overhead created a kind of ceiling that helped her focus. At least it usually did.
This afternoon, her homework sat open across her lap, pages covered in notes she’d written earlier in the week. She read the same paragraph twice without absorbing a single word. Her pen tapped absently against the margin. Her focus kept slipping, the words blurring into each other. She blamed the weather at first, the low gray light that drifted through the store like a thin veil. Then she blamed the assignment itself. Then her lack of sleep.
The bell above the door chimed.
She looked up. Fast.
A delivery guy stepped in holding two cardboard boxes. She blinked at her own reaction, then dipped her head again, trying to force her focus back to the page.
A moment later, someone walked past the DRAMA aisle, and Eve glanced over automatically.
The bell chimed a second time.
She looked over even quicker this time. A woman walked in with an umbrella dripping rainwater onto the floor. Eve exhaled slowly and pressed her lips together, then let out a small laugh beneath her breath. She didn’t understand why she kept looking. She told herself it was just a habit, a natural response to noise.
But each time the bell chimed, her heart paused, just for a beat, before she could reason with it.
She tried again. She bent over her assignment, wrote a sentence, crossed it out. Wrote another. Nothing stuck. Her eyes drifted back toward the DRAMA shelves again without permission.
She smiled at herself this time, a soft, slightly embarrassed curve of her lips.
Of course.
She wasn’t distracted because the work was difficult. She wasn’t restless because of the weather. She was waiting. For someone she barely knew. For someone she had met only once. For someone she hadn’t admitted she hoped to see again.
Her cheeks warmed. The feeling startled her, but in a gentle way, like catching herself humming a song without remembering when she started.
She closed her notebook. There was no point in pretending she would finish anything now.
She stood and walked toward the DRAMA section, not bothering to disguise the impulse anymore. Her steps were steady but quiet, as if she didn’t want to interrupt the shelves themselves.
When she reached the shelf, she saw it immediately.
Into the Woods.
Right-side up.
A warmth rose in her chest, one she didn’t try to hide. She reached for the play and slid it from the shelf, holding it in both hands.
She eased it open and let the pages fall naturally. Her eyes landed on a line near the middle:
Anything can happen in the woods.
She read it once.
She read it again.
The words stirred something she couldn’t quite describe. A recognition, the kind that rises from somewhere soft and unguarded.
She closed the book and, without hesitation, set it back upside down.
The small crooked tilt of it felt right, like a signature she hadn’t meant to practice but somehow already knew. Her lips curled into a faint smile she didn’t try to hide.
She walked back to the bench beneath the birch to gather her things. Her backpack waited where she’d left it, but before she reached for it, she stopped.
She looked up.
For the first time, she really saw the tree.
The pale curls of bark catching the soft light. The thin branches stretching upward, holding bulbs that glowed like small frozen stars. The way the trunk rose through the floor as if the shop had been built around it, not the other way around.
It was beautiful.
She let the moment wash over her, quiet and full. Something in her eased, settled, clicked into place in a way she didn’t understand yet. She reached out and touched the bark lightly, her fingertips brushing the paper-thin curl of it. She closed her eyes and sat in the moment.
When she opened her eyes, the air felt fresh somehow. She steadied herself with one last breath, picked up her backpack, and slung it over her shoulder.
The bell chimed as she pushed open the door to step outside.
It didn’t sound tired this time.
It sounded hopeful.
She didn’t look back.
The upside-down book waited on the shelf behind her, ready for whoever might notice next.