It turned up in a backstreet shop in Valencia that still smells faintly of floor cleaner and last century. Paperbacks along the skirting, hardbacks shoulder to shoulder at eye level, a low radio tuned to a station that only plays songs you half-remember from lifts. I wasn’t meant to be there. I’d gone out for bread and came back with a hardback that had a telephone number in blue ink on the flyleaf, written the way people write when they’re thinking aloud.
Not a dedication. Not an ex-libris. Just a name, then a nine-digit number with a “96” at the front, old-school looped 9s and a dot between pairs of digits, like someone had been trying on neatness and it didn’t quite fit. Underneath: llamar antes de las 19:00. Call before seven.
You get a little jolt with things like that. I stood there with the book open, pretending to compare editions while my brain did fast, stupid maths about strangers and doors. The owner behind the counter—white shirt, biro in the top pocket, the posture of someone who has carried tables—said, “Es bueno, ese,” and then added, almost kindly, “vino con otros del mismo piso.” Came with others from the same flat. He took my money in the slow way that includes change and a sort of benediction, slipped a scrap of brown paper around the jacket, and I left with bread absolutely not purchased.
At home I put the book on the plant-stand-turned-table and just looked at the flyleaf until the writing felt like a voice. Not the words—those are plain—but the hand: the way the 7 leans forward like it’s trying to take the step for you. I told myself I was only curious about provenance and then caught myself drafting a message in Notes. Marina glanced over it and said, “You’re not a detective. Start by being a person.”
So I did the plain-human thing. I didn’t call. I sent a text. “Hola, perdona el mensaje raro. Encontré tu número dentro de un libro en una librería de segunda mano en Valencia. Si te interesa, te cuento y te mando foto.” Short, polite, and easy to ignore. Then I put the phone face-down and made tea like it was an antidote.
Ten minutes later: three blue ticks (WhatsApp), then: “¿Qué libro?” New jolt. I sent a photo of the flyleaf and the jacket, no number visible, no names except their own first name cropped tight. People forget how fast a phone number becomes everyone’s, so I try to be careful with what isn’t mine to share. Another minute. “Era de mi madre.” That was the hinge. We sat in that quiet for a bit, me on my side of the plant stand, them on whatever sofa the message travelled to. Then: “¿Puedes pasar por la tarde? Vivo cerca de Ángel Guimerà.”
We met outside a café with tables that came out too far into the pavement. Early evening Valencia: scooters, a child coaxing a football, a man selling lighters who was the same man selling lighters last week. She was younger than the handwriting suggested and older than the speed of her messages—mid-30s, hair pinned up, eyes that did the quick inventory people do when a stranger arrives holding a book they used to know.
It wasn’t a valuable book, not in the way that matters to auction houses. But her mum had written notes in the margins, small, tidy, a teacher’s hand. The first page had that phone number and the last page had a date that put the two together, late summer, the year her father left. She turned the pages like you move a sleeping cat. “I gave a lot of her things to a charity shop,” she said. “The boxes were… I couldn’t finish. Maybe this one slipped.” She smiled, or maybe it was the memory making the face by itself.
We negotiated the ritual: yes, she wanted it back; no, she didn’t want change, though I offered what I’d paid and then a bit more because the price felt like an argument I’d already lost; yes, I could keep the other two from the same haul. She told me where the flat had been, where the shop owner had probably collected the boxes from, how the phone number still works but belongs to someone else now. We drank too-warm coffees and said the kind of kind, general things people say when any more detail would be too exact for a street corner.
I walked home thinking about all the ways a book carries two lives without trying—story in the text, story in the margins—and how often the second one is why you keep it. I’ve returned things before (letters, photos used as bookmarks, a whole sheaf of receipts that made an accidental diary), but a phone number feels like a little door with a bell on it. You open it carefully or not at all.
If you ever find a number in a book and your hands start doing the same stupid maths mine did, here’s what I’m learning:
- Message first. “I found this in X place. It might have been yours or someone close to you. Happy to share a photo or bring it by.” Keep it easy to ignore.
- Don’t share the number in photos. Crop. Blur. Numbers run away from their owners fast.
- Offer the book back without making it heavy. Price of the book plus a coffee is fine. If they insist you keep it, accept the gift the way it’s offered.
- If it feels like grief, don’t ask questions to make your own story better. Let theirs be the only one that happens.
- Meet in public. Bring bread if you said you’d get bread. (This rule applies more widely than you think.)
The book came home for a while. We agreed I’d scan the marginalia she wanted and return the hardback to her once she’d found space for it among things that matter. The room felt different with it on the stand—like it knew it was visiting. I made a small card for the shoebox: date, shop, “phone number on flyleaf; mother’s copy; coffee at 19:10; return when called.” It’s not a ledger. It’s just how you remember who you were when you bought something and who you tried to be after.
Later that night I fell into a catalogue rabbit hole and looked up the edition history, the translations, the reviews from when it first came out. That part—quiet, searchable, the background radiation of my hobby—is why I keep a library card and why the Biblioteca Nacional de España drains hours out of my life on purpose. I found nothing spectacular, which is often the point. The spectacular bit had already happened, earlier, on a pavement where people were stepping around our small table without fuss.
In the morning Marina read the first page’s notes and said, “She argued with the author and sometimes won.” We both liked that. We both left for the day with the feeling that a book had done its extra job, the one after the story. In the evening the phone pinged: “Gracias. Ven cuando quieras.” Bring the book when you like. We will. I’ll add it to the log: borrowed by the person it belonged to. That’s a line I didn’t know I’d get to write.
