He held out the map as if to say If you help me, I’ll explain.
“You were our other artist. You know how much that place meant to her. You saw the ideas she was trying to work on.”
I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me, but I also didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to face what I’d done that horrible summer, everything I’d lost because of it. And I didn’t want to become the one who Wally would come after first, when he inevitably worked out whatever had happened that day at the NYPL between you and your father was about the Agloe map and then traced Daniel’s steps thereafter to me.
“Please,” Daniel begged me. “Help me. He’ll never find it here.”
He was so desperate. So alone.
But I couldn’t.
I told him that if he gave it to me to hide, I’d burn it, just like the house. Just like he should have done that same night of the fire, the moment he realized he still had it. That was the only way he could guarantee that we—that you, Nell—could really be safe. I offered to do it right there, so I could see it with my own eyes and be sure it was gone forever.
But Daniel wouldn’t hand it over on those terms. And those were the only ones I would accept.
Eventually, he left with the map and promised never to come back again. And I pretended that he did go home to destroy it, for my own sanity. There was no one who could hide it better than me, so he had no other options. I convinced myself I had done a good thing. I had forced him to do what he should have done a long time ago. As each year passed, I slowly came to believe that was really true.
But when he reached out again a few weeks ago, to beg me to help him find a way out of the library, just in case, I could no longer pretend Daniel had done it. He had kept it after all—and Wally had finally figured it out.
I could not bring myself to call Eve. But Francis picked up immediately.
Even decades later, we were still an incredible team. Archives, inventory, edition verification, manufactured loan permissions, insurance, mail. We moved fast. So fast, I thought we could save him in time.
But Wally was even faster.
When I read the news that Daniel had died, alone in his office in the library, one day before Eve’s Sanborn arrived via Francis, the only thing I could hope for was that you still didn’t know anything about it, Nell.
Then you showed up at my door.
XXII
Felix continued to stare at the screen in disbelief. At a door that could not be there—in the wall of the Map Division as it glowed in the freeze-frame—and yet it was.
That’s how the burglar got in and out.
Through a trap room on a seventh edition map from an early twentieth-century flood and fire insurance company. From the page, and into the library.
It was real. The error on the Sanborn map was real.
The proof was right there on the security footage. Hiding in plain sight this whole time, if only he’d been able to notice. But who could have noticed a thing like that? It wasn’t possible.
Was it?
Even with the video in front of him, he could still hardly believe it could be true. But if it somehow was real for the NYPL, and after the strange incidents with Francis at Swann’s home and Ramona at her shop, then . . .
This meant that the phantom settlement on Nell’s map also might be . . . real?
He couldn’t make sense of it. The physics, the cartography, the architecture, the bend in reality. But one question stood out above all the others.
Did Nell know about this?
“Felix.” He finally realized Naomi was shaking his shoulder gently. “Hey, Felix.”