Elle sets out to read Doomsday Holiday, a self-printed apocalyptic comedy from the 90s she picked up at a library sale. Discovering it's filled with comments, underlines, and highlights, she slams it shut. “Who treats a book this way?” she asks her recently adopted cat. But she finds she can't stop thinking about the inscription, “For Bivy Merry Christmas Love R.” She picks it up again, hoping to learn more about these two. She thinks of R as her phantom reading partner, and weird as it may feel, also starts to think of her as a friend. R, meanwhile, finds she might have accidentally donated the book Walter was supposedly reading, even though he hadn't touched it since she gave it to him last Christmas. Between two jobs, household chores, and getting ready for her youngest daughter to become the first Bivens to go to college, she tries to replace it, but it's not easy when it was never “published for real.”