“Please,” he replied. “I’m just sorry I couldn’t have done more.”
“You did far more than anyone else.” She sighed. “I was just so angry, I needed to block it all out. But later, I didn’t want to put you in that position. Having to choose between me or him.”
“I wouldn’t have chosen,” Swann said. “I loved you both.”
“My father would have made you choose. We both know that.”
Swann sighed sadly. Nell knew that he knew she was right, although it didn’t make all the years she’d shunned him along with Dr. Young and the rest of the library any better.
“All that is in the past,” he said. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat and nodded.
“Let me get you a tissue.” He patted her shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
Nell smiled gratefully. “Thank you.”
The library’s back offices swirled quietly around her as she sat huddled on the edge of her father’s desk, next to the mess strewn across it. Researchers were finally getting to work in their cubicles, turning on their computers and shuffling through their mail. And past the staff door, patrons were browsing the stacks and choosing seats at reading tables, clicking on lamps and pulling out notebooks and flipping pages. Children were running through aisles and sneaking around the lobby. Taxis were pulling up and dropping off passengers outside. Nell tried to think about all of it out there, and nothing in here.
Gradually, she realized her hand was resting on the corner of the desk where the hidden lock was.
Ever dramatic, her father long ago had a secret compartment built into his desk that only he, she, and perhaps Swann knew about. He kept especially valuable maps inside while working on them for security’s sake, he’d said, even though the NYPL had never been robbed in the history of its existence. But when Nell was young, and he’d been a slightly gentler version of himself, he had hidden little notes to her there as well, and she would reply with childish drawings of maps she’d copied or created herself.
All she had to do was push her index finger forward a little bit. The dullest, quietest thud told her the compartment had opened.
Slowly, without moving anything but her hand, she reached inside.
There was just one thing there this time: a slim, leather-bound shape. Not a book, but a leather portfolio, for carrying around important documents or maps. She moved her fingers another subtle inch, feeling the familiar texture.
It was the leather portfolio, she was certain. Hovering near the top, three embossed letters would be clinging to the last flecks of gold leaf: TJY.
Tamara Jasper-Young.
It originally had belonged to her mother. After she died, Nell’s father took to using it, as a way to remember her. That was another thing he’d promised—that one day this portfolio, the only keepsake of her mother, would also be lovingly passed to her.
As a child, it had held almost magical power to Nell. She used to watch him slip it into and out of his briefcase when he went to work or came home in the evening, trying to imagine what beautiful work could lie inside. There were other maps he brought home too, but those came in clear plastic sleeves or cardboard folders. Only the most valuable, the most rare, of them were carried in the leather portfolio. Nell always begged to see what was inside when she spied it, because she knew it would be something special. She wondered at all of the priceless maps she must have laid eyes on as a small girl that she couldn’t even remember now. The things she’d seen every day over breakfast or before her evening bath that adults would have had to devote years of research to in order to gain access. Long after they’d stopped talking, she had sometimes thought of the portfolio, about the things he still carried inside it.