Between The Lines

Marvelle Okafor has built exactly the life she wanted. After seventeen years in New York academic publishing, she walked away from a prestigious career and opened Turning Pages, a small bookshop on Main Street in Silver Springs, Ohio. Twelve years later, the shelves are organized by what readers actually need rather than what publishers call things. The Tuesday evening biography group argues productively every week. The back alley holds sixty-two watercolor paintings of the same brick wall, each one slightly different from the last. Life is full, purposeful, and entirely her own.She is not looking for anything more.Then Marcus Webb walks in.He came to Silver Springs to help his elderly mother after a fall, armed with an errand list and a plan to be gone in two weeks. He is sixty-four, recently retired after thirty-one years as a literature professor at the University of Chicago, and quietly figuring out what his life looks like now that the institution and the argument and the routine of a career are gone. He is not looking for a bookshop. He is not looking for anything.He stops in front of the November display window anyway.What begins as a conversation about shelf organization becomes something neither of them planned for. Marcus keeps coming back, once, twice, four times in a week, buying the Montaigne and the biography of Earl Hines and the novel from the shelf labeled FOR WHEN YOU ARE FIGURING SOMETHING OUT. He joins the biography group. He rides along on the Thursday drive to Harding on the county road, because the light is better that way. And Marvelle, who has spent twelve years learning to pay careful attention to the world, finds herself paying a very specific kind of attention to him.Neither of them is young. Both of them have already lived full, complicated lives. Both of them know the cost of caring about something you might lose. And both of them are, slowly and with their eyes open, choosing to be surprised by what is still possible.Between the Lines is a slow-burn, later-in-life romance set in the warmth of a small Ohio town and a bookshop that organizes its shelves by what people actually need. It is the story of two careful people learning to be a little less careful, one conversation at a time.Book 2 of the Silver Springs Series. Can be read as a standalone.