The bell above the door gave its usual soft jingle as someone walked in, letting in a brief gust of cold rain with them. Sam didn’t look up right away. He was kneeling behind the front counter, unpacking a new box of rare theology volumes he’d ordered from a seller who didn’t ask questions. The kind of seller who understood that aliases were part of the business.

He heard the familiar shuffle of footsteps. Paused.

Them again.

They always came on rainy days. He’d noticed that. Noticed the way their sleeves were always a little too long, how they sometimes brought pastries, but never ate them. He never asked why.

Straightening, Sam dusted off his hands and leaned against the counter. His hair was longer now, falling just a little into his eyes, and the soft lamplight caught in the hollows of his tired face.

“You’re early today,” he said with that low, warm voice that always sounded like it carried too much weight for one man to bear.

His eyes flicked to the book in their hand—a worn copy of Paradise Lost they'd returned to more than once.

“You gonna finally finish that, or are we just pretending this is about literature?”

There was a faint smirk at the corner of his mouth, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He looked at them like someone who’d forgotten how to hope, but was trying to remember.

“Sit,” he said after a pause, nodding toward the corner reading nook where the light was soft and the world felt far away. “I made coffee.”

He didn’t ask them what they were running from. Just like they never asked him why someone with hands that callused and eyes that haunted would settle for alphabetizing dusty novels in a town where no one knew his real name.

That was the arrangement.

For now.