The Library of Lost Souls

Story/Novel Title: The Library of Lost Souls

Genre:  Fantasy Romance / Mystery

Author: PARK JIAN (ME)

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CHAPTER

FOUR

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Ordinary Days Aren’t Ordinary Anymore

Firasha walked home in the rain with Wren’s words sitting in her chest like a stone she’d swallowed whole.

Nothing gets rewritten for free.

She turned it over and over the whole way back, the way you press your tongue against a sore tooth even though you know it’ll hurt. A memory. A year. Sometimes a person. She thought of her mother’s ring, cold against her collarbone, and wondered — not for the first time that night — whether some cost had already been paid a long time ago, for a story that never got the chance to be rewritten.

She told herself she wouldn’t go looking for him.

She told herself that for three days.

On the fourth day, she found herself standing outside a small woodworking shop on Miller Street, staring through a rain-streaked window at a boy bent over a workbench, sanding down the edge of something small and careful, like it mattered more than anything else in the world.

She hadn’t meant to end up there. That was what she told herself, anyway.

The bell above the door rang when she pushed it open, too loud in the quiet shop, and Javiar looked up so fast he nearly dropped whatever he was holding.

“Mystery girl.” His whole face lit up before he could stop it, and something in Firasha’s chest lit up right back, uninvited. “Okay, now I know you’re following me.”

“I was walking by.”

“Uh-huh.” He set the piece of wood down and wiped sawdust off his hands onto his jeans, grinning like he’d caught her at something. “This shop is three blocks from that library. You don’t just walk by here.”

“Maybe I like wood.”

“Nobody likes wood, Firasha.” He said her name like it was already familiar in his mouth, easy, worn soft at the edges. “Nobody walks into a random carpentry shop because they like wood.“

“Fine.” She crossed her arms, fighting the smile trying to pull at her mouth. “I was curious what kind of person spends his evenings in a library with no name and his days making furniture.”

“It’s not furniture.” He picked the small carved piece back up, turning it so she could see — a bird, wings half-spread, so detailed she could count the individual feathers. “I don’t really do furniture. I do this.”

“That’s…” She stepped closer without deciding to. “That’s really good.”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” But he was smiling like the compliment had landed somewhere soft in him anyway. “My dad taught me. Before he—” He stopped, the sentence folding in on itself, and set the bird down a little too carefully, like it needed his full attention suddenly. “Anyway. Yeah. He taught me.”

Firasha recognized the shape of that sentence. She had a dozen of her own just like it, sentences that stopped exactly where the truth got too heavy to keep holding up.

“You don’t have to finish it,” she said quietly.

He looked up at her, surprised, like he’d expected her to push. “Most people push.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No,” he said, studying her in that way he had, like he was trying to read a page written in a language he almost understood. “I’m starting to get that.”

The shop was quiet except for the rain on the window and the low hum of a space heater in the corner. Firasha wandered along the shelf of finished pieces — birds, foxes, a small fish caught mid-leap — running her fingers just above the wood the way she’d learned not to touch things she wasn’t sure about anymore.

“So what’s your excuse,” Javiar said, leaning back against his workbench, arms crossed, “for showing up at a carpentry shop three blocks from a library that apparently has a guest ledger nobody’s ever seen?”

Firasha’s hand stilled over one of the carvings.

“I wanted to see if you were real,” she said, and it slipped out truer than she meant it to. “The other night felt like it might’ve been a dream.”

Something shifted in his expression — softer, more careful, the joking edge sanded down like one of his little birds. “Feels pretty real to me.” He tapped his own chest lightly. “Heart’s still beating and everything.”

For now, she thought, and hated herself for thinking it.

“Hey.” His voice pulled her back. “Where’d you go just now?”

“Nowhere.” She forced a small smile. “Just tired again. I keep telling you that.”

“You keep telling me a lot of things that don’t sound completely true.” He said it gently, not accusing, just observing, the way you’d point out rain outside a window. “I’m not going to push. I just — notice things. Occupational hazard of working with my hands all day. You learn to read grain, you start reading people too.”

“And what do you read in me?”

He considered the question longer than she expected, like he actually wanted to get it right instead of just filling the silence.

“Someone carrying something heavy,” he said finally, “who’s decided not to put it down in front of anyone. Even when they probably should.”

The words landed closer to the truth than he could possibly know, and for one terrifying second, Firasha almost told him everything — the library, the book, the line that wouldn’t leave her head. He does not know how little time is left. The confession sat right at the back of her throat, ready.

She swallowed it instead.

“That’s a lot of insight for someone who makes wooden birds,” she said, deflecting the way she always did, and he laughed, letting her off the hook without ever knowing he’d offered her one.

“I contain multitudes.” He grabbed a rag, wiping down the bench like he needed something to do with his hands. “My sister says I overthink people because I underthink myself. She’s annoyingly accurate about most things.”

Sister. Firasha filed that away without meaning to — a small, ordinary detail that felt oddly important, though she couldn’t have said why.

“She sounds fun.”

“She’s a menace.” But he said it with so much warmth it wasn’t really an insult at all. “You’ll probably meet her eventually. She has a radar for anyone I mention more than once, and I have a feeling I’m about to mention you a lot.”

Firasha felt heat climb up her neck and looked away before he could watch it happen. “Careful. Mystery girl might not want to be found.”

“Too late.” He said it lightly, but his eyes weren’t light at all when she glanced back at him. “Pretty sure I already found you.”

The bell above the door rang again as another customer walked in, breaking whatever fragile thread had been stretching between them, and Javiar straightened up, slipping easily back into shopkeeper mode, calling out a greeting. Firasha used the moment to breathe, to remind her lungs how that worked.

“I should go,” she said, when he glanced back at her.

“You always say that right when it’s getting interesting.”

“Bad habit.”

“Come back anyway.” He wrapped the little wooden bird in a scrap of cloth and held it out to her before she could argue. “For the road. So you have proof I’m real, next time you start doubting it.”

She took it without meaning to, fingers closing around the small warm shape of it, and something about the weight of it in her palm made her chest ache in a way she didn’t have a name for yet.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, and meant it more than the two small words could carry.

Outside, the rain had softened to a mist, and Firasha stood on the sidewalk for a moment, turning the little wooden bird over in her hand, replaying every second of the last twenty minutes like she was afraid she’d lose it if she didn’t.

That was when she noticed him.

A man stood across the street, still and unbothered by the weather, hands in his coat pockets, watching the shop window — watching her — with an expression that wasn’t curiosity and wasn’t quite anything else she had a word for either. He didn’t look away when her eyes caught his. He simply held her gaze, calm as still water, like he already knew exactly what she was holding in her hand and exactly what it meant.

Firasha blinked, and in that single blink, he was gone — vanished into the mist and the passing crowd like he’d never been there at all.

She stood frozen on the sidewalk, the wooden bird pressed tight against her palm, her heart hammering a question she didn’t have an answer to yet.

Had she imagined him — or had someone else already noticed exactly what she’d done inside that library?