"Hi," he said. Then, because he seemed to realize that was insufficient: "Sorry, I've done this before. I'm not sure why I'm acting like I haven't."
"It's fine," Claire said, and meant it. A lot of people got weird when the call actually connected — all that waiting, the anticipation of the queue, and then suddenly a real face and five minutes and no script. "You have A Fine and Private Place."
He looked down at the book like he'd forgotten it was there. "Yeah. I found it at — actually, you talked about it. Three months ago. I looked everywhere and finally found a copy at a church sale for seventy-five cents."
"Seventy-five cents," she repeated. "That's the correct price."
He smiled. It did something to his face that she noted and then immediately set aside, the way you set aside a thought that seems interesting but isn't useful.
"I'm Marco," he said.
"Claire." She said it automatically. She always said just Claire. She'd decided early on that a first name was enough — real but boundaried, friendly but not locatable.
"So what did you think?" she asked. "Of Beagle."
"Honest answer?"
"Always."
"I didn't expect to cry at a book about a ghost raven and a talking bear living in a cemetery." He paused. "And then I did. And then I was annoyed about it for a few days. And then I think I understood why you said it was the loneliest hopeful book you'd ever read, because I kept thinking about that phrase and I couldn't get it out."
Claire looked at him for a moment. In two years she had heard a lot of responses to book recommendations — grateful ones, polite ones, the occasional unhinged one — and she had learned to receive them warmly without letting them land too hard. It was a kind of professional softness. You stayed open but you stayed surface.
This one landed anyway.
"That's exactly it," she said. "That's the whole book."
"I know, and I was annoyed at you a little bit too, if that's okay to say."
"Very okay."
"Because I hadn't cried at a book in probably four years and I wasn't planning to start."
She laughed — a real one, not the camera laugh — and somewhere behind her the pothos rustled in a draft from the window she'd forgotten to close. The timer in the corner of her screen ticked past five minutes. She noticed it and did not reach for the Complete Turn button.