A Sisterhood of Secret Ambitions by Sheena Boekweg

Author:Sheena Boekweg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

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The library had always seemed a sacred place to me. All these stories, all those voices hidden behind bindings, monuments to a person’s thoughts, sitting on shelves ready to be taken. Just walking in was like visiting a friend, or coming home. But I think I feel more at rest in a library than I do in my own bedroom.

That’s why I chose it as the place to meet Andrew.

Maybe libraries were my home. Though I’d never crossed the threshold of this building, even a new library felt familiar somehow, and that gave me strength. I’d meet Andrew, officially, in this place that filled me up.

My thoughts were still and steady as I walked through shelf after shelf, looking for Andrew. He wasn’t on the first floor, and from Iris’s signal, I knew he wasn’t on the second floor either.

I walked carefully up the oak staircase to the top floor, and when I reached the landing, I paused and gathered my breath, pressing down my dress and making sure my hair clips hadn’t slipped from behind my ear.

Here goes, I thought. Let’s go meet your future husband.

It was bright on the top floor of the library, with plenty of large round windows letting in warm sunlight that shone on wooden shelves and softly bound books. The top floor of the library stored the periodicals, newspapers from decades and the century past, and important papers locked in files. It was quiet here, so quiet I could hear the sound of someone flipping pages of a book. The long shelves opened into empty tables, streaks of sunlight illuminating dust motes that floated as gentle as fairy wings. It warmed the bindings of the books and the air and my tense muscles.

I stepped forward, and there, sitting in the base of a curved window, totally absorbed inside a story, was Patrick Elliot Villipin.

My hand flew up to my chest, and I ducked back behind a shelf.

How? How had he sneaked past the Gossips? How had they missed him?

But for a single second as I took in Patch as he leaned against the curved sill with his knees up against the wall, with the book not five inches from his face, his simple tan-collared shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, the black sweater folded carefully across his lap as he read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, in that moment, his being there made a perverse kind of sense. He loved my favorite book. Perhaps this was a sign that he was there when I was made of nothing but nerves and need.

I slipped back behind a shelf.

This was not the time to get romantic. I had a mission. I needed to find Andrew.

Footsteps tapped closer. I hid myself better when a small boy about six or seven years old with dark hair trimmed in a line above his eyebrows ran up to Patch’s side and flopped down on his lap.

“I’m bored,” the boy said, his voice carrying to where I hid.

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