LAURA

An elderly woman with white hair and a gently curved back buys Letters to a Young Poet. A rosy-cheeked man with dimples and blond curls, like an overgrown cherub, buys American Psycho. A teenager with pastel pink hair and a healthy layer of blusher over the bridge of her nose buys The Fountainhead.

“Don’t be mad,” Eli says, stopping to rest a giant stack of mind, body, and spirit titles on the till point. Angels and crystals, tarot cards and auras. Smoke and mirrors to pad the pain of reality with a comfort blanket of mysticism.

“Don’t give me a reason to be mad,” I counter, sliding a pretty hardback called Astro Poets from his stack and turning it over to read the blurb.

“I’ve invited the rest of the team tonight,” he says with an impish grin.

I lower the book and scowl at him. “Oh, you suck.”

“Don’t give me that face,” he says, neatening his pile of books. “I invited Sharona, and then she invited Martin, and then Martin asked if he should text Barry and it just snowballed. Are you actually mad?”

“I thought it was just gonna be us, that’s all.”

He opens his mouth with a frown, and then pauses as he searches for the right words. I realise with a hot rush of embarrassment that it might have sounded like I thought we were going on a date. “I mean, I was going to invite Sharona anyway,” I say quickly, placing Astro Poets back on to his pile of shelving. “But did you have to invite the entire team?”

“Isn’t it for charity though? I thought the vibe was, like, the more the merrier?”

“Yeah, but . . .” A tug of uneasiness, and then the image of Roach, eyes shining as she talked about Ted Bundy, calcifies in my mind. “I dunno, it’s fine. I just wish you’d asked me first.”

I lean on the counter and inspect my fingernails. The polish has chipped away around the edges, leaving a craggy island of peach paint on each nail.

“Ah, you’ll smash it,” he says, earnest and sweet. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

He smells like fresh sweat and nag champa, and when he smiles, his cheeks dimple.

“I don’t respect you enough to hate you,” I reply, and he laughs as he disappears towards the lift.

A little girl in a yellow raincoat picks a board book with a rubber duck on the cover. An elderly gent in a stained three-piece tweed suit buys The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. A woman with fuchsia acrylics and matching pink lips buys The Valley of the Dolls.

Sometimes people surprise me, and sometimes they do not.