The Bookshop at Dusk

You left your fingerprints on every spine in the fiction aisle— I know because I checked, dusting each one with the forensic patience of someone solving a crime that hasn't been committed yet. The shop smells of old paper and the bergamot tea you brewed on the hotplate in the back room where we sat on overturned crates and argued about Neruda until the argument became something else entirely. Dusk comes early in November. The streetlamps outside stutter on like uncertain confessions, and the window displays our reflection overlaid on rows of paperback romances— a palimpsest of us and every love story ever told, none of them quite right, all of them somehow true. I close the shop at seven. Lock the door. Leave the sign turned to OPEN by accident, or maybe by design— a small rebellion against the finality of closing time.