“Have your main-character moment when you step through these doors,” Amanda Anderson tells me from the love seat at the front of The Last Chapter , the romance-only bookstore she opened in Roscoe Village two years ago.

The sentiment fits; the shop practically invites an entrance. Velvet furniture, soft lighting and thoughtfully arranged shelves make the space feel equal parts bookstore and fanciful refuge. Even the photo booths—three of them, each its own tiny world—feel like winks at the genre: one lined with heart-shaped Post-its, another mossy with a glowing neon sign.

After years on Wattpad—home to fan-fiction epics and plot twists dramatic enough to make a high-school English teacher blush—and later at a marketing firm supporting indie romance authors, Anderson realized she want

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