The first frost arrived on a Tuesday, settling on the apple crates outside the bookshop like a thought half-remembered. She unlocked the door at the usual hour and the bell — a small brass thing her father had brought from Lisbon — gave its familiar two-note complaint.

Inside, the air smelled the way it always smelled: of cold paper, of the radiator clicking awake, of the cinnamon stick she kept in the till for reasons she had stopped trying to explain.

It would be three hours before anyone came in. She liked these hours best. The shop did not yet have to be a shop. It could be, briefly, only itself.

She made tea in the back room, the kettle grumbling as it always grumbled, and she stood at the small window that looked out onto the service lane. A pigeon was examining a crisp packet with the focused intensity of someone reading a contract. She watched it for longer than seemed reasonable.

The algorithm, she had been told, could predict what a person wanted to read next with ninety-three percent accuracy. She had not asked who had told her this, or what the other seven percent wanted instead, or what it meant to want something that a machine had already decided you would want.

She went to open the shop.

The first customer of the day was a man in a coat that was too thin for the weather. He came in fast, as if blown, and stood just inside the door looking at the shelves with the expression of someone who has forgotten why they came.

"Looking for anything in particular?" she asked.

He considered the question more carefully than it deserved. "Something I haven't read yet," he said. "But that I've been meaning to."

She almost said: that describes everything. She said instead: "What have you been meaning to read?"

He named three books. She had all three. She led him to the first, on the shelf near the window where the light was good in the mornings, and she left him there because she had learned that some customers needed to be left alone with the thing they had finally found.

The frost was melting outside. The pigeon had moved on. The radiator clicked and clicked.

She opened her notebook to a blank page and wrote nothing in it for a while, which was, she had come to understand, a form of writing.