Our Paperback Alibi

How it begins

Iris recognized the romance by the coffee stain shaped like a disappointed rabbit.

It sat in the auction-house window between a maritime atlas and a book nobody could open without white gloves. She had packed it herself for the prison library six weeks earlier. Inside its back cover lay a letter she had promised not to read.

The price estimate contained four digits.

“That's my rabbit,” she told the man beside her.

He lowered his spectacles. “An unusual collecting category.”

“The stain.”

“Ah.”

He introduced himself as Samir Vale and said he restored books. Iris said she delivered them. This seemed an adequate foundation for cooperation, although his coat looked expensive and hers contained an emergency banana.

Inside, an assistant explained that the lot could be examined only by registered collectors.

“We are,” Samir said.

“Joint account?”

He hesitated.

Iris put her hand through his arm. “We've been disagreeing about paper together for years.”

The assistant smiled with the sympathy reserved for long relationships.

At the viewing table, Samir opened the cover carefully. The letter was still there, tucked behind a loose endpaper. Its envelope bore a first name and no address.

Iris felt her shoulders relax.

“May I?” he asked.

“The binding. Not the letter.”

He nodded.

For a few minutes she watched him work. His attention was quiet and exact. He did not turn her urgency into a performance or ask why a cheap paperback mattered.

Then he showed her a narrow strip of blue cloth beneath the spine.

“This was repaired twice.”

“So?”

“The second repair concealed something the first owner wanted found.”

Across the room, another bidder stopped examining the atlas and looked directly at them.

Samir closed the book.

Iris tightened her hand around his sleeve.

“Darling,” she said, discovering the usefulness of a word she had not used in eleven years, “I think we need a larger banana.”