The letter came in a plain envelope, the way these things always do, like the landlord’s office understands there’s no font that makes a rent increase feel less like what it is. This is the third one since I started here twelve years ago, and each time the arithmetic gets a little harder to make work with used paperbacks priced at four dollars and hardcovers at eight. I’m not the owner, so the actual numbers aren’t mine to share, but I’ve watched the ones I can see, the storefronts on either side of us, closely enough to do rough math of my own.

The coffee shop two doors down didn’t survive the second increase, the one five years back. It had been there longer than I had, run by a couple who knew most of their regulars by their order, and I remember the specific quiet of the week after it closed, the block missing a sound it had always had, the espresso machine’s hiss through their propped door on a warm morning. A vape shop took the space for a while, then sat empty, and now it’s something selling artisanal soap that I genuinely don’t understand the business model of but wish well anyway, because empty storefronts are worse for everyone still hanging on nearby.

I think about why we’ve survived three increases when other, arguably more essential businesses on this block haven’t, and the honest answer is a mix of luck and a specific kind of stubborn loyalty from people who don’t shop here out of convenience. Nobody needs a used bookstore the way they need a coffee in the morning or, for that matter, a pharmacy. The people who come in are choosing something slower than what most of the neighborhood’s newer businesses are selling, and I’ve come to think that slowness is actually the thing keeping us alive, not despite the neighborhood changing around us but almost because of it. We’re one of the last places on the block where nobody’s trying to turn a table over in twenty minutes.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion for this one, which isn’t usually how I like to end these. The rent will probably go up again in another five or six years, and I don’t know if we survive a fourth notice the way we’ve survived three. What I know is that the shop is still full most Saturdays, and that a customer who’s been coming in since before I worked here told me last month that she still can’t quite believe we’re still open, and said it like a compliment, and I took it as one, even though I heard the worry underneath it too.