Part 1: The New Bodyguard

“I'm your new bodyguard,” the little girl announced.

She stood in the doorway of my library wearing a dark jacket that reached her ankles. Its sleeves had been rolled so many times that her hands barely emerged. A toy badge hung from a piece of string around her neck.

I lowered my newspaper. My staff knew I disliked interruptions before breakfast. Yet this visitor was four years old, and she had placed herself between me and a tray of toast with unmistakable determination.

“Who appointed you?” I asked.

“I did. You need protecting.”

“From what?”

She looked at the toast. “You keep forgetting to eat it.”

The absurdity caught me off guard. I laughed, a sound so unfamiliar in that room that the housekeeper, who had appeared behind the girl, stopped in the doorway.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Hale,” she said. “Poppy found the jacket while I was putting away the winter coats. I turned around and she was gone.”

Poppy lifted a hand. “I'm working, Mom.”

Her mother, Lena, had joined the household staff three weeks earlier. She worked mornings while her daughter attended a nearby preschool. That morning the preschool had closed unexpectedly because of a water problem, and Lena had called my assistant for permission to bring Poppy while she made other arrangements. I had approved it without listening to the details.

I was Daniel Hale, owner of a small group of neighborhood bookshops and, according to the business pages, a difficult man to negotiate with. My wife, Sarah, had managed the shops with me until her death three years earlier. Since then, I had kept the library exactly as she left it and treated every interruption as a threat to the little order I could still control.

Poppy walked to the table and pushed the toast toward me. “It's getting cold.”

I took a bite. “Am I safe now?”

“Not yet. You need water.”

Lena covered her smile with one hand. “Poppy, Mr. Hale has a meeting. Let's go find your crayons.”

Poppy considered me as though assessing a complicated assignment. Then she nodded. “I'll come back after the meeting.”

“You don't have to,” Lena said.

“But his water is empty.”

My assistant, Martin, appeared with the day's schedule. He looked from Poppy's oversized jacket to my half-eaten toast. “I see the security situation has improved.”

Poppy took this as confirmation of her title. She followed her mother out, the jacket brushing the floor, and promised to guard the crayons until further notice.

At the meeting, Martin showed me a proposal to close our smallest shop, the one Sarah had opened beside the old railway station. It had lost money for six months, and the lease was due to end. I knew the numbers. I had avoided making the decision because Sarah's handwriting was still on the shelf labels.

When I returned to the library, Poppy was sitting on the carpet. She had drawn a house, a tall man, and a tiny figure in a square jacket. Above them she had drawn a large red circle.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Your safe place,” she said. “But there's a problem.”

She pointed to a door in the drawing. It had no handle.