Page 132 of Battle of the Bookstores

I oblige, and she places a sparkly pin in my open palm. It says:BookboyfriendHusband.

My eyes go wide, and I close my fingers around the pin, slipping it in my pocket next to the velvet box I’ve checked and rechecked a dozen times today.

“She hasn’t said yes yet,” I whisper.

“She will,” Cinderella says, patting my shoulder. “She’s a smart girl.”

The compliment makes me smile. Josie has managed to endear herself to all my OGs, which wasn’t the easiest task. Everyone made the transition to the new store except Eliza—and that’s only because she’s studying and playing soccer at the University of Florida. We miss her, but she’s promised to stop by whenever she comes home for school breaks.

In her absence, Nora has added a few more shifts—including leading story time on Saturday mornings. She bristles at any comparison to a sweet grandmother, but the role fits her. Indira’s here almost every day. She still wears all black—but she’s got a bright pink ribbon on her name tag that lets people know she’s an assistant manager. She’s done an amazing job familiarizing herself with the new genres we carry, and it’s been nice to have an assistant manager who actually assists.

Georgia isn’t on staff, but she might as well be with how much time she spends studying and hanging out in our café. She still makes incessant jokes about my height, but I put upwith it because I love Josie and Josie loves Georgia. I kind of love her, too. In that annoying-kid-sister way. It’s nice not being the youngest in this little found family of ours.

I’ve met their mom a few times; she’s working to earn Josie’s trust back, holding down a job, going to therapy, and staying out of the dating world for now—but it’s Georgia whose blessing I asked for. She also helped me pick out the ring. There are two small diamonds (Georgia made me make sure they weren’t blood diamonds) and the center stone is an emerald. According to my future sister-in-law, emeralds are the stone of intuition and foresight, and throughout time they have been seen as symbols of truth and love. I couldn’t think of any better symbolism for my relationship with Josie.

A smattering of applause calls my attention to the event space; the conversation is over. I head up front to help people check out, but Henri, one of our new employees, has it under control. They’re moving faster than the credit card machine can approve the purchases, handing customers a multicolored bag printed with our new store name: Beyond the Pages. Thanks to Josie’s coaching, I was able to negotiate my involvement in the naming of the new store as a condition for accepting the job. Xander surprisingly agreed, which shows just how desperate he was.

Kind of like how desperate I am to get this crowd moving, so I grab a pad of sticky notes and help write the names for Luke to sign.

An hour and a half later—one superfan bought twelve books!—we say good night to Luke and his very pregnant wife, Jessie, and lock the door behind them.

We’re finally alone.

My stomach knots up. After participating in hundreds ofbookish proposals, it’s my turn. For so long, I thought I’d never find my love story, that I was meant to help other people find their beshert (a Yiddish word Josie taught me, which means the person they were destined for). Never in a million years would I have thought my own beshert would end up being the prissy girl who worked at the highbrow bookstore next door.

“What are you smiling about?” Josie is looking at me suspiciously, her hand on her hip.

“Aren’t I allowed to be happy?”

She steps closer and gives me a quick kiss. “Let’s go home and we can be happy there.”

Home.I love that word—and the fact that we moved into a two-bedroom apartment near Porter Square a month ago.

“In a minute,” I tell her, my stomach uneasy with nerves. “I got you something—sit down and I’ll be right back.”

Josie moves to her favorite spot, the reading nook on what used to be the Tab side of the store. The old leather couch from Happy Endings is there, and we’ve added a rug and a lamp to make it feel homey. When I return, her shoes are off, and Persephone is purring in her lap. She looks like the BookshopGirl I always imagined.

“Here you go,” I say, handing her the wrapped package. My hands tingle in anticipation.

“A blind date book?” Her eyes light up. “It feels pretty thick…”

“Just read the clue. Out loud.”

She gives me a soft smile. It took Josie a while to warm up to what she calls my acts of adoration, but as she says, there are worse things than being in love with a practicing romantic.

“ ‘Enemies to friends to lovers,’ ” she reads, then looks up. “I didn’t know that was a thing?”

“Keep reading.”

“ ‘Witty banter, slow burn, online epistolary, Jewish representation, tall fetish’—this sounds like it could be our story.” Josie laughs, but I’m too nervous to join in.

“Open it.”

She unwraps the brown kraft paper slowly, like she knows what’s inside is precious. As she takes in the cover—an illustration I had commissioned—her eyes grow wide. The two of us, standing back-to-back in front of our respective old stores. Josie has her nose in a book, but I’m only pretending to read mine. Instead, my eyes are on her. The title isBookFriends to Lovers.

“There’s a blurb from Penelope Adler-Wolf,” Josie says, confused.

Josie’s mentor and friend was more than happy to give our story an endorsement: “A true testament to the power of love and good literature.”

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