“What I promised I would,” he said. He was staring at her like she was an apparition, a spirit. “All this time, I never gave up. I knew you couldn’t be gone. I’ve been searching for a way back in ever since.”
Nell watched her mother’s eyes dart between Wally, the gun, Felix, and the strange scanning machine on top of the printing press beside him.
“You can’t imagine how difficult it’s been to return to a place that doesn’t technically exist,” Wally said, as if it were a sufficient explanation. His words were slow and thick, clumsy. He had been convinced he would find her here, but to truly see her again at long last was overwhelming. “But all of it, everything I had to do to find Agloe again, has been for you.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Tamara replied. “I didn’t want you to do any of this.”
“Then why did you stay?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question. “Why did you leave your husband and your daughter, and let all of your friends believe you were gone? Why did you let me believe it?”
He pointed to the package in her hands.
“Why did you finish your half of the Dreamer’s Atlas?”
As one, their eyes all drifted down to follow the line of his finger. Tamara gently pulled the package to her chest, as if doing so could protect it.
When Wally finally spoke again, his voice was soft, as if coming from somewhere far away. “I didn’t understand at first. The fire, and you had vanished. . . . But after a few days, while we waited for the local police to close the investigation into your death and let us all leave, I realized what had really happened. That you hadn’t died, but were trapped inside Agloe, somehow. And I knew that if you were still inside, you would still be working on your half of the atlas. I swore that I wouldn’t rest either, until I’d finished my part of it as well.”
“Would that be your Haberson Map, or all the people you murdered in your search for a way back in?” Felix asked sharply.
Wally didn’t bother to look at him. “I just had to find a way back in, to find you again, and the atlas could be complete. And now it can. You and I, Tam. The town can be ours.”
“Oh, Wally,” Tamara said. She shook her head. “It was never supposed to be ours. That’s why I stayed. To stop that from happening. To stop you from going too far.”
“Too far?” he asked. “This is just the beginning.”
“No,” Tamara said. “No more.”
Wally stared at her, not understanding—or refusing to.
“You have to let it go.”
Finally, Wally smiled. Nell could see in his eyes that he never would. Maybe his original goal, all those years ago, had been only to prove that Tamara hadn’t died in the fire after all. To prove that he wasn’t guilty of killing the person he loved most in the entire world. But the grief had festered, the years had corrupted.
For so long, the map and Tamara had been the same thing—he had believed that if he could have one, it would be the same as having the other. He had spent so long seeking the map, he had lost sight of the fact that it was simply a means to an end. It had become the end for him.
“You just have to trust me,” Wally said. “You always trusted me before.”
Even now, when faced with Tamara herself, Wally had become too obsessed with the thing he’d been hunting his entire life. It was more real to him than the person. He would choose the map over everything else.
“Give it to me, Tam.”
Nell and Felix both froze—all Nell could think about was Swann, how he had tried to do something heroic with her copy of the map and she had lost him for it, how she had to prevent that from happening again—but Tamara’s hands didn’t move. Instead, she looked at Nell.