“We’re almost ready,” he said, pointing to the camera. “We’ll go from the top.”
“Jack, did you know Sofia is seeing someone?” Courtney asked.
Sofia cringed at the repeated lie. But Jack did a double take and met Sofia’s eyes. It was the smallest of flinches on his part, but it was enough to gratify Sofia for the rest of the day.
“I am,” she said, defiant.
“I’m happy for you,” said Jack, in a hollow voice.
“Tell Jack his name,” said Courtney.
Sofia gritted her teeth, keen to follow through with the adolescent lie because it was making Jack sweat. But now that he was looking at her with what might have been sadness, she found she couldn’t think of a name.
“Did you make him up?” asked Courtney, grinning.
“No . . . I . . .” She couldn’t think of a name. She didn’t want to think of a name. She was exhausted by the whole thing. She could not compete with a twentysomething Californian.
“Even imaginary boyfriends have names,” said Courtney. Her cornflower-blue eyes gleamed with joy. A camera operator chuckled nearby.
Then a figure moved toward them through the crowd. The crew parted. Dave Croft emerged from where he must have been standing for some time. He strode up to Sofia and placed his arm around her shoulder.
“Hi,” he said.
Courtney and Jack and the rest of the crew seemed to take in the scene with a general sense of bewilderment. Sofia was as shocked as anyone but had the good sense, and the acting talent, to say nothing.
“Sorry I’m late. Got held up at the gym,” said Dave. “Lifting loads of weights.” He wore his librarian clothes and leather shoes. Dave turned to Jack, whose mouth was still wide open. He held out his hand. “Dave Croft,” he said. “The boyfriend.” Sofia stifled a laugh. The whole performance was so ludicrous, but also so endearing, that she found it difficult to imagine anyone would possibly believe it. To her surprise and delight, everyone seemed to.
“Jack Travers.” They shook hands. Courtney stared at them with wide eyes. A vein throbbed in her temple.
“Of course,” Dave said to him. “Forrest Gump is one of my favorite films.”
“I didn’t direct that,” Jack said.
“I know,” said Dave. He grinned and turned to Courtney. “And you are?”
Courtney’s mouth dropped open. “Courtney Smith?” she said.
Dave smiled and shook her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Courtney stomped off. Dave turned to Sofia. “Are you free, babes?” He croaked when saying babes, as though he had never said the word before. “I want to show you something.”
“You can’t have her,” blurted Jack. “We’re rehearsing a scene, pal.”
“I’ll be five minutes, Jack,” Sofia said. “You don’t need me quite yet, anyway.” She walked away and motioned for Dave to follow her outside. She knew from experience that Jack would be watching her go.
“So sorry about that,” Dave said, once they were outside. “Putting my arm around you and saying I was your boyfriend. I said that because I overheard them talking. I didn’t mean it. I know I’m not your boyfriend.”
“Good, I should hope not,” Sofia said, though she still smiled. “Thank you, though. Kind of a rock-star move.”
Dave smiled. “Oh.” He shuffled his feet.
“What did you want to show me?” she asked him quickly.
He cleared his throat. “Right. Check it out,” he said, and opened his bag. “I dug deeper on Mrs. Sinclair.” He pulled out a book and began flipping through its pages. “I thought about the records we have of Jane Austen. Biographies of her are patchy. Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy—we have reams of information on them. But for Jane Austen, we know basically nothing. She is an enigma.”
“Why? She is a huge writer.”
Dave shrugged. “No one thought to keep them. I don’t know.”
Sofia scowled. “Can we not ask her about the facts of her life herself? She does live with me.”
“I know she does,” he replied.
Sofia smiled. Any normal person was within their rights to call her crazy when she claimed she lived with a nineteenth-century author. But he did not. Which perhaps made him not normal, but it was still nice.
“But here’s the thing,” he added. “The Jane Austen in your house is still a young woman. She’s had no books published, no achievements. In the time she’s come from, she’s not famous yet. The information we need she doesn’t yet know herself.” Sofia nodded. “But there was one source of information I hadn’t considered. In her lifetime, Jane Austen wrote three thousand letters. One hundred and sixty of those survive today.”
Sofia raised an eyebrow. “Did Jane write Mrs. Sinclair a letter?”
“No,” he replied. Sofia scowled. “But Mrs. Sinclair wrote one to Jane.”
“What?” Sofia said. She inhaled. “Show me.”
He handed Sofia the large blue book. The cover read Sotheby’s Annual. The opened page contained auction-house listings.
“This is like the sports pages for antiques geeks,” Dave said. Each line contained names and dates. “These are the details of known letters written to or from Jane Austen.”
Sofia scanned the page and gasped. “Here!” She pointed to an entry on the page and read it aloud. “Mrs. Emmaline Sinclair to Jane Austen. She wrote Jane a letter in 1810!”
Dave nodded. “Before she went to Australia.”
“What do we do, then?” Sofia asked.
“We find that letter.”
“How exciting! We are intrepid book hunters!” Sofia said. She smiled at him.
He blinked and smiled back. He gazed down and flipped through the book again.
SOFIA ESCORTED DAVE over to catering. “Grab yourself a coffee before you return to the library.” She walked back to Jack and Courtney to rehearse. Neither of them said anything unrelated to camera angles and script coverage for the rest of the scene.
At one point during the rehearsal, Sofia looked over to the catering table where Dave was attempting to make himself a coffee at the espresso machine. He loaded the beans into the machine, but when he pressed the button only scalding water emerged. He swore and jumped on the spot. He glanced around to see if anyone noticed. Eventually he
