“Nell. These are not authentic.”
The words struck her like lightning.
“Not a single one.”
“How—”
He tilted the box slightly, caught sight of the word junk scrawled on the side, and smirked, as though it was evidence in his favor.
“Come on, the donor could have just reused a box. Why would someone purposefully donate junk to the NYPL?” Nell said, frantic, but he just shook his head. It only made her angrier.
“Plenty of reasons. Fame. Money. Attention from a scandal.”
“But these are—”
“Enough,” he said, with a coldness that startled her. “They’re nothing more than cheap reproductions. Not worthy of the library’s time.”
She was stunned to silence. Her father was renowned for his expertise, his abilities incomparable, but still. The speed with which he’d rejected her discovery was shocking.
If she hadn’t already shown half the department what she’d found, she would have just run out of his office, sobbed in the bathroom, and never brought it up again. But this time, she couldn’t just accept his assessment lying down. Nothing would be more humiliating than to have to crawl back to everyone, especially Swann, especially just after he’d all but promised her a position at the NYPL, and admit she’d been nothing but an overeager intern who didn’t know what she was doing. She did know what she was doing! She was sure the maps were authentic. This was her professional reputation on the line, and she would not let her father bulldoze her the way he did everyone else.
The ensuing argument was the worst they’d ever had. And what happened after . . .
The elder Dr. Young was well known for his temper when he didn’t get his way with a certain project or his portion of the research budget, but she’d never experienced the full brunt of his anger until that day. Their debate escalated to a shouting match, but Nell refused to back down. In the end, she didn’t even know what they were screaming about.
But she would never forget what happened next.
There was a whole crowd watching them by then. Swann and several other researchers were crammed into the office, trying to defuse the situation—and one more.
As the chair of the NYPL herself, steely, regal Irene Pérez Montilla, came running into Dr. Young’s room, shouting that the library’s patrons could hear them in the main hall, her father snatched the box from the ground and demanded Nell’s immediate firing. Or else he—the Map Division’s most acclaimed scholar, the famous, invaluable Dr. Young—would quit.
Nell had argued. She had begged.
She had even cried, in front of everyone.
An hour later, she was standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue, holding another cardboard box—this one containing everything that had been at her desk.
Nell shook her head sharply, throwing off the reverie, and folded the map back up so she didn’t have to look at it.
She didn’t know what had happened to the rest of them, but out of everything that had been in that box, this map was the one in his portfolio. This was the single one he kept from that day.
Why on earth would her father have insisted to the point of destroying her life that the Junk Box Incident maps were worthless, but then secretly have kept clearly the most worthless one of them all for over seven years?
She cast about, looking for something to distract her from the churn of emotions inside. Across the kitchen table, her eyes settled on her laptop in its battered case.
According to NYPL procedures, Nell knew the next step after the initial survey of a new specimen to a collection was to log it into the vast interinstitutional artifact database.
But . . . this one?