The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

WHEN I GOT BACK HOME, I REALIZED THAT FERMÍN OR MY father had already opened the bookshop. I went up to the apartment for a moment to have a quick bite. My father had left some toast and jam and a thermos of strong coffee on the dining-room table for me. I polished it all off and was down again in ten minutes, reborn. I entered the bookshop through the door in the back room that adjoined the entrance hall of the building and went straight to my closet. I put on the blue apron I usually wore to protect my clothes from the dust on boxes and shelves. At the bottom of the cupboard, I kept an old tin cookie box, a treasure chest of sorts. There I stored a menagerie of useless bits of junk that I couldn't bring myself to throw away: watches and fountain pens damaged beyond repair, old coins, marbles, wartime bullet cases I'd found in Laberinto Park, and fading postcards of Barcelona from the turn of the century. Still floating among all those bits and pieces was the old scrap of newspaper on which Isaac Monfort had written down his daughter Nuria's address, the night I went to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to hide The Shadow of the Wind. I examined it in the dusty light that filtered between shelves and piled-up boxes, then closed the tin box and put the address in my wallet. Having resolved to occupy both mind and hands with the most trivial job that I could find, I walked into the shop.

"Good morning," I announced.