Wally’s gaze was still locked on Nell, but it was as though he wasn’t really seeing her anymore. He seemed lost with his ghosts again, trapped in the past.
“Your mother wanted you to read it, so you’re going to read it,” he said. His grip on the gun tightened. “Out loud. So we all can hear it.”
Nell could see the handwriting faintly through the thin white sheets. Hurried, half-cursive, a mess. She had to work up the courage to reach out and take the pages from Tamara.
“From . . . my father?” she finally managed to ask.
Her mother nodded gently.
“From both of us,” she said.
Tamara and Daniel
August 1990
Agloe
Darling Nell,
You’re asleep now, dozing in our arms as we take turns sitting with you and kissing your soft forehead. Soon it will be time to go back to the motel and rent a car bound for New York City after that. But there are still a few more hours until dawn. A few more hours we can spend together.
There is so much we want to tell you, and so little time.
If you’re reading this, you know that your mother survived after all. I hope that you already knew it anyway before this letter, before you even came to Agloe, because it finally became safe to tell you everything. I hope we’re all together as you hold these pages.
But no one can see the future. We certainly couldn’t, when we all showed up here earlier this summer, young and innocent and wholly unprepared for what we discovered. And now that Wally has disappeared, his motel room cleaned out as though he was never there, we can’t take any risks. You are too precious to us, Nell.
Until the day we can be sure that Wally is no longer a threat, we have to protect you from this secret. If you know nothing about what happened, nothing about the map or the town, you cannot be a target.
But we don’t know how long it will be until that day. How long it will take the one of us on the outside to figure out what happened to Wally, or for the one of us on the inside to complete our final work.
A letter is not enough, but it may be all we have. We write it just in case.
Inside Agloe, the fire burned for days. But the building Wally had chosen to be his vault was small and simple—mercifully, the flames did not spread to the structures next door. They consumed the place where he’d hidden all of his maps and then finally flickered out.
I lay alone on the curb across the street and watched the building burn until it was ash. I was too exhausted and in too much pain to do anything else. And I’d already done the most important thing. You were safe, Nell. And so was your father. I’d managed to get you both away from the blaze—and the last map, as well.
I knew that eventually your father would find it stuffed into your clothes. I knew he’d come back as soon as he could.
I just had to figure out how to survive until then.
I decided to take shelter in the printing factory. I gathered what Romi had left behind from the ice cream parlor and brought it here. I was sure the answer was somewhere in one of our drafts, some scrap of our notes. That whole summer, she and I had argued about the direction of our Dreamer’s Atlas—Romi had insisted we could only understand the town from the outside in, but I was convinced of exactly the opposite. We had to understand it from the inside out.
When the project had belonged to all of us, I’d tried to wait until Romi and I had agreed on a path forward before I began my part. I’d crumpled up half theories, shredded unfinished ideas, afraid to go too far without her. Without the Cartographers. But now, I had no choice—experiment or perish.
I began experimenting.
There were false starts. I was hungry, dehydrated, and impatient. My surveys of even single buildings were rushed, sloppy. But I got the hang of it in time.