It was a tiny store, built in a one-car garage behind a big Victorian house. “Although we’ll run into each other soon enough in here.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” she’d said when they walked in. The woman behind the counter was unpacking a box of paperbacks. Nothing as dramatic as this, sheets of water falling so thickly from the sky that Jane couldn’t see a foot outside the window. If it rained at all, it was a delicate sprinkle that lasted ten or fifteen minutes and ended with a rainbow. She wasn’t used to driving in the rain-neither of them was. “I don’t want to go any farther until this lets up a little.” They’d made it to Maine about thirty minutes ago but the rain had driven them off the highway and into this town with the strange name-Kennebunkport-and Ruth had pulled over and idled on the side of the road until Jane searched bookstore on her phone and found this one. Outside, the rain pelted down angrily, it sounded like muffled gunshots on the roof of the bookstore, but inside, inside, surrounded by books, surrounded by the smell of them, she felt calm and tranquil, momentarily at ease, like the past five weeks had never happened. Had the smell of books calmed her down then, as it did now? She must have been a baby, a toddler, ripping pages out of a picture book about a talking stuffed animal. What it had tasted like, how it had felt-the scratch of it as it slid down her throat. She couldn’t remember the first book she had eaten.

Katrina leno horrid