“Francis, please!”
Francis didn’t stop. He nudged the door closed after him as he entered, obscuring her view into the room, but it didn’t matter. She was right on his heels and reached the door a moment later.
She threw open the door and leapt into the study. She would make him talk to her, somehow. Maybe she could offer him something from her father’s personal collection, any map he wanted. Harvard would kill for a piece from Dr. Young’s holdings. “I just want to—”
But the rest of her sentence died on her lips.
Nell took a few steps into the room, but it was no use. The study was large, but square and open, with nowhere to hide.
It didn’t make any sense.
There wasn’t another room to go into, or a back exit, or even a closet, and all the windows had bars on them. There was nowhere Francis could have gone. And yet, the study was empty aside from her.
He’d vanished into thin air.
X
Jimmy’s Corner was as quiet as it usually was, even for a bar on Friday night in midtown. It was one of the reasons Felix liked this place so much. Back when he was an intern at the library, he and Nell used to come here all the time after work to unwind. The bar became their go-to hangout: comfortable, cheap, and totally unfrequented by any of the other employees, despite being just around the corner from the library.
He’d stopped coming after he’d been fired and had broken up with Nell, afraid of the memories, but tonight, he hadn’t been able to stay away. He’d spent the first hour of Dr. Young’s service pacing his Haberson luxury corporate apartment, unsure of what he felt, and the second hour roaming the streets, trying to ignore the guilt as the miles grew longer. He was completely within his rights to have declined Nell’s invitation, he told himself. It would be impossible to expect him to still have warm feelings about the man who’d fired him and tanked his reputation. Or his daughter, who’d gotten them sucked into the mess in the first place.
Right?
Without realizing it, suddenly Felix was ducking under the old blue awning at the entrance to Jimmy’s Corner and pushing the door open, bracing for a blast of warm, humid air from within, just like he always had.
Some places you didn’t need a map for, he sighed wistfully.
He moved slowly into the cramped space, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. Everything looked mostly the same—a bar that was more glorified hallway than anything else, crammed with vintage pictures and twinkling string lights. The huge, crowded collage of photos patrons had taken of themselves while hanging out there was still spread across one wall, and an army of framed black-and-white shots of Muhammad Ali, an old friend of the owner, and other famous boxers, midfight, still on the other. There was room for none of it, and all of it, and more.
He hadn’t known how much he’d loved this place until he saw it again.
Taking a table alone seemed rude, even though there were plenty to spare. As he neared the bar counter, still half-immersed in his thoughts—they had stools now, not chairs, when had they changed that?—his eyes passed over a woman sitting midway down the row. She was short, with a crop of unruly brown hair, and her cardigan draped around her like an oversized blanket, nearly swallowing her small frame—
He froze.
“Tonight got to you too, did it?” Nell asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his hands up, already backing away. “I can go.”
“No. It’s okay.” She patted the stool beside her guardedly, as if unsure what she wanted either. “Sit.”
Felix smiled ruefully at himself. He should have known. Of course this bar was the most likely place she would end up tonight, too. Some habits were hard to break.
Because it had been unconscious habit, and not a purposeful choice, that he had come here, hadn’t it? He just hadn’t been thinking as he wandered. Or had he been thinking entirely too much?