Midwinter's Eve: Chapter Thirteen
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Nicolas woke before his alarm, alert in a way that didn’t make sense for his body. Usually the first thing he felt was weight. A kind of pressure behind his eyes, the leftover heaviness of sleep refusing to let go. Most mornings he had to work his way out of it, slow and irritated, like pushing through thick air.
Not today.
He blinked once, twice, and the world was already clear. His thoughts weren’t tangled. His limbs didn’t feel glued to the mattress. There was no fight.
He knew exactly why.
It wasn’t a guess. It wasn’t a maybe. It was the quiet certainty that she had seen his note, answered it, and flipped the book for him to find. That alone seemed to have rewired the whole morning.
He sat up with none of the usual negotiation. No bargaining for five more minutes. No sense of dread about getting upright. His mind felt awake in a way he almost didn’t trust, as if something had clicked on in his sleep and forgotten to switch back off.
He walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower before he realized what he was doing.
He never showered in the morning.
He stood there watching the steam rise, confused for a second by the simple fact that he felt capable of it. Morning showers always felt like too many steps before his brain was ready: the water, the temperature, the noise, then body wash, shampoo, face wash, drying off, getting dressed.
Usually it was overwhelming enough to skip entirely until night.
But right now none of it felt like too much. The sound didn’t grate. The routine didn’t feel like a mountain. He stepped in and let the water hit his shoulders, surprised by how normal it felt. Easy, even.
He washed up without rushing. No fog. No drifting. Just movement.
He stepped out of the shower and let the cooler air settle around him. No heaviness waited on the other side of it. His thoughts stayed clear. Simple, even.
He dressed without drifting off halfway through. Grabbed his keys. Reached for his jacket and didn’t lose track of what he was doing. Everything moved in one straight line, steady and unbroken.
There was an energy inside him that he didn’t question, like his day already knew where it wanted him to go.
He stepped outside, took a breath, and fell into an easy stride.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t slow down.
He just went, carrying the energy that had been there since he opened his eyes.
Closed Today.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
The sign was taped to the inside of the bookstore door, the ink slightly smudged near the corner where someone’s thumb had pressed too hard. Nicolas read the words without blinking, then looked through the glass.
The shop was dark. The overhead lights were off, leaving only a thin wash of morning sun spilling across the floorboards near the entrance. Farther in, the large birch tree stood as a faint outline, its branches recognizable only by shape. The rest of the store was mostly shadow.
Even so, he could make out the DRAMA section. The sun caught the top of the shelving just enough to lift those letters into view.
He knew exactly where the book sat. He didn’t need to see it. Its presence in the dark felt certain and steady.
He would have to wait.
It surprised him how natural the pause felt. The closed door didn’t knock anything loose in him. It didn’t dip the energy he’d carried since waking. It just created a longer space between here and whatever waited for him on the other side of it.
He let the moment stretch.
It reminded him of a morning from childhood, standing at the window on the first snowfall of the season, watching flakes drift down with a slow confidence. Nothing was happening yet: no school cancellations, no sledding, no lights switching on, but the world looked different in a way that promised something. A quiet rise of expectation, soft and steady, before anything actually arrived.
That was the feeling now.
A beginning held in place.
He took another breath, the cool air settling around him as he stepped back from the door. The street was calm, the kind of late morning where nothing demanded anything from him. The store would open again. The book would still be there. The note would still be waiting.
There was no rush.
No frustration.
Only the sense that waiting was part of whatever this was becoming.
He adjusted his jacket and continued down the street, the warmth of that anticipation leading the way.
Eve spent her first class trying not to think about the note she left in the book, which immediately meant she could think about nothing else.
Maybe stop following the trees.
And then the smiley face.
That stupid face.
She had meant the line as a light jab, a dry little nudge at his attempt at humor. It was supposed to land clean, with a small edge. It took all of that and twisted it into something else. It made it look like she was being playful. Or soft. Or worse, that she was flirting.
She was not flirting.
She took notes in one class, then noticed the sentences didn’t connect. In another, she kept staring at the clock as if it would speed things up for her. A friend asked if she wanted to grab something after school. She answered yes, then immediately said no, then shook her head because none of it made sense.
She couldn’t focus.
She couldn’t eat.
She couldn’t stop seeing the smiley.
It was only a mark on a Post-it, but it felt like a version of herself she had not agreed to show. And now it was sitting in a book, waiting for him to read it and decide what it meant.
By the end of the last period, her chest felt tight with a kind of restless urgency she could not shake. She packed her bag quickly and stepped outside without speaking to anyone.
Her walk started at a normal pace. Then a little faster. Then faster still. Not running, but walking with a rhythm that carried the speed of her thoughts. Her mind was loud, crowded with what ifs and assumptions and every version of him finding that note, each one landing before the last had finished.
She kept imagining him opening the book.
Seeing the note.
Seeing the smiley.
Misreading everything.
The thought tightened her throat.
She turned the last corner toward the store.
Her pace slowed immediately.
Her eyes had already found the window and slid along the shelves until she found the familiar section.
The book hadn’t moved.
Relief washed through her so quickly she had to stop walking for a moment. Her shoulders lowered. Her breath eased out. The panic loosened its grip. She still had time. She could fix this. She could remove the smiley and pretend the whole thing had gone exactly the way she wanted.
She stepped the rest of the way to the door.
Then she saw the sign.
Closed Today.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
The words hit her harder than she expected. Her stomach dropped. Her hand slid away from the door as she stood there, staring at the message like she was trying to force it to mean something else.
Inside, she could see almost nothing beyond the faint outline of shelves and the shadow of the birch tree. The book was still there. The note was still there. And she was stuck on the outside of all of it.
A rush of frustration rose in her chest, quick and messy. Not at the store. Not at him. At herself, for caring enough that a closed door could send her thoughts spinning again.
She leaned forward to read the printed hours on the window. She read them once, then again, hoping she had misread something.
She hadn’t.
The store would not open until after she was already sitting in her first class.
A tight, panicked thought shot through her mind.
She could skip school.
Call out sick.
Pretend she overslept and come here instead.
The idea felt possible for half a second.
Then it collapsed immediately.
She wasn’t the type to skip school, and she knew it.
She stepped back from the door.
Another thought rushed in before she could stop it.
Maybe he wouldn’t come tomorrow. Maybe she still had a chance.
The hope rose too fast and felt thin the moment she touched it.
She pressed her fingers to her forehead, annoyed at herself for even trying to bargain with the situation. The hours on the window weren’t changing. She would be in school. The store would open without her. And the note would be waiting for whoever reached it first.
A small breath escaped her, sharp and frustrated.
She turned away from the door, walking down the street with a pace that looked steady from the outside, even though her thoughts kept lurching back and forth between impossible plans and the sinking realization that none of them would work.
By the time she reached the corner, one final thought pushed through everything else.
That face.
It sat in her mind with the same awful clarity it had all day.
She kept walking, the image following her no matter how hard she tried to leave it behind.
Nicolas moved through his work day with a steadiness that felt almost new. Sharp focus, answering messages, finishing tasks. The energy from the morning hadn’t faded. It held.
He found himself talking to coworkers more than usual. Not forced small talk. Actual conversations. He laughed at something someone said and didn’t feel the usual question of “did I laugh too loud? Not loud enough?” The ease of it surprised him, though he didn’t say anything about that out loud.
The fog had been gone since the moment he opened his eyes, and nothing tugged it back. No drifting. No losing track of time. Just clear, steady movement from one thing to the next.
Every now and then, the thought of the bookstore flickered in the back of his mind, soft and warm, but it didn’t pull at him. He wasn’t waiting for anything. He wasn’t counting the hours. The feeling carried itself.
When the day wound down, he packed his things and headed out without thinking twice. He didn’t look toward the bookstore. The idea never even surfaced. He just walked with the same quiet brightness he’d had since morning.
Tomorrow would come.
A spark of wonder rose in him, the kind that comes with the sound of sleigh bells.
Eve got home in the late afternoon and dropped her keys into the bowl by the door. The house was calm, the way it usually was. Her mom was in the kitchen finishing up emails for work, a half-empty mug of tea beside her. The smell of something simple simmering on the stove filled the room.
Eve set her backpack on the table and opened her notebook.
She read through her assignments.
She answered what needed answering.
Everything was fine. It just took more effort than normal to stay with it.
Every now and then, her mind tugged back to the book in the store. Or not even the book. The moment that would come when someone finally opened it. She tried to push the thought aside, but it drifted around the edges anyway, small and steady.
“Everything alright?” her mom asked at one point, not looking up from her screen.
“Yeah. Just tired,” Eve said, which wasn’t untrue.
Dinner pulled her from her desk. They ate together at the table, the kitchen warm and bright. Partway through the meal, her dad started telling a story about backing into a row of shopping carts in the grocery store parking lot and pretending it didn’t happen, only to realize someone had been watching the whole time.
Eve laughed. A real laugh.
And it felt good for a moment.
“There’s that smile,” her mom said gently.
The comment wasn’t pointed, not even close, but it nudged something loose inside Eve. The warmth faded just a touch. Her thoughts drifted right back to the worry she’d been holding all afternoon, quiet but persistent.
After dinner, she loaded her dishes into the dishwasher, then went to her room. The late sun had left a faint glow on the walls. She tried reading a chapter for English, but her mind wandered again, not in a panicked way, just in a way that refused to settle.
She closed the book and got ready for bed. Her room looked exactly how it always did. Her routine moved the same way it always did. Nothing outside her felt different.
It was the quiet inside her that had changed.
When she turned off her lamp and lay down, the house had gone calm. A car passed outside, headlights sliding across her ceiling. She turned onto her side and pulled the blanket up, hoping the stillness would help.
But one small detail, the curve she hadn’t meant to draw, pushed forward again, sharper now that the day was almost done.
She let out a quiet breath and closed her eyes.
It didn’t go away.
It just settled into the dark with her.
As Eve lay wide awake, flipping her pillow for the fourth time and wondering why she was so tangled up in all of this, her thoughts kept circling the same point.
Why did she draw it.
It wasn’t cute.
She wasn’t flirting.
She groaned into her pillow, wishing she could march back to the store and erase the little grin right off the note.
And in the next town over, Nicolas fell asleep instantly, tucked under his blankets with a quiet smile.
The kind Eve had been trying to erase all day.