The Last Page

I read it in eleven days, which for me counts as fast, reckless fast, honestly. The kind where you start resenting anything that pulls you away from it, work calls, dinner, people wanting to talk about their weekends like that's a reasonable thing to expect of you. By day four I'd stopped answering texts unless they came from my sister, since she was the one who'd pushed the book on me in the first place. By day nine I was rationing chapters, one at lunch, one before bed, like there was a limited supply and I needed to make it last. Turns out there was.

Everyone who'd read it before me warned me about the ending, always in that same hushed register, lowering their voice slightly, like they were handing me something breakable. My sister actually said, wait until the last page, you'll need a minute after, and wouldn't elaborate no matter how I pushed her. So when I finally got there, late on a Tuesday, lamp on, everyone else asleep, there was nothing. Just a stub of paper near the spine, torn rather than cut, catching the lamplight at a strange angle that made it look almost silver.

I checked the copyright page. The index, which had nothing to do with anything, but I checked it anyway, the way you check your pockets a second time for keys you already know aren't there. I flipped the whole book upside down and shook it once, gently, as if the page might fall out from wherever it had been hiding. Nothing fell out. I sat there for a while in that half-slumped position you end up in when you're reading on the floor against the couch, legs gone numb beneath me, thumb pressed into the torn stub, flattening it, letting it spring back, over and over.

The house was very quiet by then. The fridge cycling on in the kitchen. A car passing outside that wasn't going anywhere near me, just through, on its way somewhere with an ending intact.

Finding another copy seemed simple at first, almost laughably so. It was a bestseller; half the people I knew owned one, stacked on bedside tables or shoved spine-out on shelves between other books they'd never quite gotten to. The secondhand shop near the station had three copies last month. I'd walked past them on the new-arrivals table, thinking, smugly, that I already had mine. By the time I went back, two were gone and the third had water damage swelling through the last third, the paper soft and grey at the edges, fused together in a way that made the back of the book feel less like pages and more like something left out in the rain and given up on. I touched the cover once and didn't try to open it.

The library waitlist had something like forty people ahead of me. I sat on the website refreshing it, twice, as if the number might change in my favor if I wanted it badly enough. It didn't. That evening I emailed a couple of online sellers, the same message copied into each form. One wrote back within the hour to say their listing photo was outdated. That copy was also missing its last page, no idea why, it had come in a box lot from an estate sale and nobody had checked closely until now.

The detail stuck with me longer than it should have. Someone had owned this book, finished it or not, and then died, or gone into care, or simply stopped needing books the way people eventually do, and somewhere in that, the last page disappeared. Maybe by accident. Maybe not. I kept picturing hands, someone else's, gripping the page right at the spine and pulling, slow, the small tearing sound it must have made in whatever room they were sitting in.

By the second week I was checking three different secondhand sites every morning before I'd even made coffee, kettle ticking behind me, ignored. I found an old forum thread one night, mostly dead, replies stretched thin over a couple of years. Buried near the bottom, someone mentioned the author used to sell signed copies through her own website, and that those copies were slightly different, an extra page, maybe an afterword, nobody seemed sure.

The site barely worked when I found it. Slow to load, a spinner that hung there too long, fonts a bit dated, narrow margins, the kind of design nobody's touched since 2012. A contact form sat at the bottom, past an About page that hadn't been updated in years. I filled it in, fingers hovering over the keyboard longer than necessary, then closed the laptop lid most of the way without quite shutting it.

She wrote back two days later, short, a little clipped. She had one copy left from the original run and would post it if I covered the postage. No explanation for the price. No explanation for why she still had it after all this time. I typed my card details in faster than I should have.

It took twelve days to arrive. Longer than the whole book had taken me to read the first time, a fact I noted with the particular bitterness of someone keeping score against nobody. I checked the tracking more than I'd like to admit, watching it sit in "processing" most of the week before it finally moved. When it came, the package was plain brown paper, crushed slightly at one corner, my name written across the front in pen that had skipped near the end of my surname.

I cleared the kitchen counter first, pushing aside a mug from that morning and a stack of mail I'd been ignoring, and set the package down like it might need the room. I didn't open it right away. I just stood there, hand flat on top of it, paper cool under my palm, before tearing it open along one edge.

The book looked right. Same cover, same weight, that faint, slightly sweet smell of glue secondhand books carry no matter their age. I went straight to the back, no slow build-up, just my thumb finding the last pages and pulling them open.

Gone. Same stub. Same ragged tear by the spine, catching the kitchen light the same way the first one had caught the lamp.

I stood there, thumb still resting against it, the kitchen light somehow too bright and too dim at once depending where I shifted my weight. Eventually I ran my fingertip along the torn edge, slow, the way you touch a bruise to confirm it still hurts. It didn't catch on anything. It just felt the way torn paper feels, rough one way and smooth the other, unwilling to tell me anything more than the first copy had.

It's been four months since the postage stamp, and I still open that kitchen drawer sometimes, late at night, just to check the stub's still there, still torn the same way, as if it might have healed shut in the meantime, or worse, grown back into pages I hadn't asked for. I lent my friend Priya the original a few weeks ago, the one I'd read in eleven days, missing ending and all, and told her exactly what my sister told me, in that same hushed register. Wait for the last page, I said. You'll need a minute after.

It's been four months since the postage stamp, and I still find myself opening that drawer sometimes, just to check the stub's still there. I lent my friend Priya the original, the one I'd read in eleven days, missing ending and all, and told her exactly what my sister told me: wait for the last page, you'll need a minute after. I watched her face when I said it, the small flicker of curiosity she probably didn't notice herself making. I didn't mention the part where there might not be one.