He was back in the real world. There was no dirt path, no shops, no houses, no factory around him.
No Agloe.
“Felix?” a voice called. “Felix!”
Felix turned to see two figures rushing toward him across the field.
“Naomi! Priya!” he said, startled.
“Thank goodness you’re all right!” Naomi exclaimed as they reached him, and both she and Priya wrapped him in a hug.
“How—”
“We followed you!” Priya said. “You weren’t answering us, and then we saw you and William start to move away from the house address, so we kept tracking your phone signal. Then all of a sudden, it just vanished!” She grabbed his arm as if to check that he was truly there. “We got in Naomi’s car and took off. We’ve been searching everywhere—I thought we’d lost you. And then all of a sudden you just . . . appeared! Right in front of us!” she cried.
Felix rocked sideways as they let him go at last, trying to find his feet.
“What happened?” Naomi asked him.
He shook his head, overcome. He didn’t have the words to explain.
“Felix!” another voice called. The others Nell had come with were running toward him from the far side of the field, where they’d been huddled beneath the trees.
“You’re all right!” Humphrey cried, scooping him into an even fiercer embrace than his friends had. “Where are Wally and Nell?”
“Oh my God,” he heard Ramona say.
They were all facing Felix, Humphrey still holding on to him after the hug, but looking past him now, staring over his shoulder in shock.
“Is . . . that . . . ,” Naomi stammered.
“Is he . . . ,” Priya asked.
“He’s alive,” Felix said. “But it’s over.”
On the ground just behind Felix, William Haberson—Wally—lay crumpled in the mud, hopeless at what he’d lost. He would never find the town again. Not without the map it had taken him nearly his entire lifetime to find. His eyes were glossy and distant, barely blinking, and all the fight had gone out of his body.
If Felix hadn’t been there in Agloe himself, he’d hardly have been able to recognize the man.
But he would have known the woman standing beside Wally anywhere.
Even decades later, she still looked just like Nell.
“Tam?” Ramona whispered.
Tamara smiled. “Romi,” she said.
Felix didn’t know any of them well, but the bewildered, relieved sobs that burst out of Ramona, Francis, Eve, and Humphrey as they collapsed upon Tamara, hugging and kissing her as she cried too, made his own eyes sting. Or perhaps he was thinking of the inevitable grief Tamara would have to endure over Daniel’s death. He suspected she knew that her husband was gone already, because it was Nell who had showed up in Agloe at the end, and not him, but that would not dampen the loss any, once she’d had time to face it.
He thought he knew how she must feel, in a smaller way.
He wiped his tears and looked back out to the field, where, by all laws of physics and nature, there should have been a town, but was not. Where Nell should have been but was not either.
“Was it all still there?” Francis asked at last, his gaze lost somewhere in the same field. “After all this time?”
“It was,” Felix replied.
“Did Nell save it?” Eve asked.
“I . . . think so,” he said.