Prologue

There is nothing better than the smell of books. The crisp paper of a new novel or an old, dusty tome was all the same to me. It was what I loved best about that little secondhand book shop nestled in the downtown area. I had worked there since I was sixteen and my parents had told me to go out and get a job. It was owned by a man named Oliver Jenkins. He hired me right on the spot, without even asking for a résumé. He knew me well enough considering that I was a regular customer. I had never actually bought anything. I would slip it and find a cozy spot in the corner with book I had picked off the shelf. After reading for a couple of hours, Mr. Jenkins would find my hiding place and kindly tell me that he was about to close up shop.

"You may keep that one, if you like," he'd say sometimes.

When I thanked him, he would wave an old, wrinkled hand and say something like, "That book has been on that shelf for twenty years. I don't think I'll ever sell it. Might as well go into the hands of someone who'll care to read it."

I would walk home from school every day and take a detour down Main Street. The book shop was one of the oldest buildings on the street. The door was wooden with a glass panel where the open/closed sign could be seen from the street. When the door was opened, a jingle of chimes could be heard throughout the small, one-room store. Glass display windows on either side of the door were piled high with what had once been bestsellers. They had been read and then sold to Mr. Jenkins. He would never consider them ever being anything but what they were, bestsellers in their time.

“Just because it was on the New York Times Bestseller list in 1978, doesn’t mean it’s not just as good in 1988,” he had said to me once.

I have worked there ever since. It was not a Hollywood studio with a camera crew and a film director, like I had wanted as a teenager, but that dream was dead and gone. It was something that I discovered would never happen to me, Sarah Williams. I was just an ordinary girl and ordinary girls deserved quiet lives.

As I grew from a young girl of fifteen, to a young woman of twenty-three, I discovered that I loved something far more steadfast and simple that the ever-growing, ever-bustling world of acting. I loved books, yes, but above all, I loved the familiar. I felt safe knowing that I could come home to a house that I could call me own and have my family live just a few blocks away.

Something that happened to me when I was fifteen had made me turn away my wild, stubborn ways. I wasn’t a naïve teenager anymore. I was changed during those thirteen hours of my life.

I like to think he was, too.