Raven's Peak Read Online Free PDF Page B

back corner. It was the middle of the work week, so it wasn’t very crowded inside. That was fine with him; he wasn’t in the mood to talk to a lot of people.
    He slipped his laptop out of his bag and powered it on, then hooked it up to the Wi-Fi and started browsing. To be honest, there wasn’t any particular reason for him to visit the library; he could search the Internet inside his apartment, but he didn’t really want to be alone. He’d been alone in his grief for the last few days, and he needed to get out and see other people.
    This library had been his second home while he was studying for his graduate degree. It was small and quaint with a lot of old editions of books he liked to leaf through. Just being here was enough to help him relax and clear his mind. All he was trying to do was keep from thinking about his family, especially his—
    “Haatim?” someone asked, interrupting his thoughts and pulling him back to his surroundings. He glanced up and saw Kelly Smith standing over his table. She was holding a stack of books and smiling quizzically at him.
    Crap. He definitely didn’t intend to run into any of the other students he’d gone to school with. Kelly had been in many of the same Theology classes as him, and they’d been pretty good friends through their time in graduate school. Now, both had their Theology degrees, which were about as useless as Humanities degrees in the outside world.
    That was before he went back home to India and they lost touch. He hadn’t known what had happened to her, and he definitely wasn’t expecting her to still be living here.
    The look on her face spoke volumes as she sized him up. He knew how must look, disheveled and pathetic with several weeks’ worth of stubble on his cheeks. He was also wearing sweatpants and probably looked more ready to take a midday nap than do research in a library.
    “Hey, Kelly,” he offered.
    “Wow, I wasn’t expecting to see you back in town,” she said. “I thought you’d move back home.”
    “I did,” he replied awkwardly. “What are you doing here?”
    “I work here,” she answered. “Temporarily, until I can find a teaching job.”
    What are the odds, he thought with an internal sigh.
    “That’s awesome,” he said instead. “I hope you find something soon.”
    “Me, too. So how long are you going to be in the country?”
    “A few months,” he said. “Just back for a while.”
    She nodded conspiratorially, and he knew what she was about to say. She was going to bring up his sister, which was something he didn’t want to talk about it with her. “I heard about your—”
    “Where are you planning to teach?” he interrupted.
    She frowned. “I put some applications in the area, and I’m hoping to stay local. Mostly just community colleges, just until I can get established. Brad proposed last month.”
    She held up her hand so he could see the ring. It was big but incredibly plain. “It’s nice,” Haatim offered. He didn’t know anything about wedding rings but felt like it was the right thing to say.
    “We don’t want to move just yet, so here’s hoping I can find something good soon. What about you? Are you planning to teach, too?”
    “No,” he replied. “I thought about it, but it just doesn’t really feel like something I want to do.”
    “What about your blog? Are you still writing?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Still writing.”
    His blog was called the Hidden Lens, and he wrote about various religions of the world and how they interacted with each other in positive ways. It had consumed him when he first started it, and he’d hoped he could use it as a positive contribution to the world.
    But now it just felt…empty.
    “Sort of. That’s actually why I’m here. I’m trying to find inspiration for something to write about.”
    “I remember your post about how all religions stemmed from the same prism and how if people could understand that it would fix so many things.”
    He shrugged.