“Nell . . .”
Somewhere in the traffic, someone honked, startling them both.
“No,” she said. The black car turned and disappeared down the street. “It’s the break-in. I’m just jumpy.”
“No, you’re not! If you really think you’re being followed, after everything we just talked about—”
“Let it go, Felix,” she insisted. “Seriously.”
“But . . .”
“You know I’m going to keep working on this no matter what,” she said. “Either help me or don’t, but don’t argue with me.”
He recognized the expression on her face. He could tell Nell was so upset, if she said one more word, she’d burst into tears, which she hated doing. Instead, she grabbed her glass and fiercely downed the rest of her beer. Felix sighed, relenting, and slid her what was left of his, and she downed that too, sputtering.
“It’s just been a weird couple of days,” she said once she’d recovered. “I was so angry at him, I never wanted to see him again, but even so, you don’t really think about . . .” She reached for the glass again, and then gave up, remembering it was empty. “And now here I am, trying to follow his trail, hoping I can finally understand him, except the more I uncover, the more confusing it gets.” She groaned, frustrated, and balled up her napkin. “What was he going to do with this stupid map, if not sell it? Why did he keep it all this time, then?”
Felix nodded desperately. He wanted to say something, anything, to help comfort her. His hand had drifted up from the bar on its own as she spoke, reaching for her. They both realized it was resting on her back at the same moment they realized she’d also leaned into his chest, curling into the hug.
“Can I see the other map? The one from Francis?” he asked quickly, his cheeks burning, as they leapt apart.
Nell cleared her throat and busied herself with opening the envelope, trying to look focused. She handed the map over without looking at him.
“Hey, this is the library,” he said when he recognized the building on the page.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s an old insurance diagram from the early 1900s. They used them to assess a building’s risk and determine what to charge them for flood and fire coverage—what each wall was made of, how close they were to other buildings. So many places were built from wood back then, it was a risk.” She sighed. “So now I have two long-out-of-date, useless maps, and no answers.”
Felix was still staring at it, thinking. “Sanborn,” he muttered as he reread the title in the legend. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
But he was already holding up his phone again. “You know the rare book and maps fair they hold here in New York every year?”
“Rare book and maps fair? You mean the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, at the Park Avenue Armory?”
He chuckled at her enthusiasm. “Yeah, that one.”
“It was my whole life,” Nell said, smiling a little, too. “I mean, my whole old life. My father and I went every year as soon as I had learned to walk.”
“I know. You were the one to first take me, when we moved to New York from UCLA.”
For a moment, the memory of that day hung sweetly in the air between them—he could remember how excited she was to show him everything, and how amazed he had been at the incredible artifacts they had there, that he was allowed to see and touch them all. But after a moment, the dark history of what happened after began to creep in.
Felix rushed on, before the bitterness of the Junk Box Incident could settle on them. “One of Haberson’s other branches is working on a searchable digitization project of historical texts, and they were going to have a demonstration at the fair this weekend,” he said. “I have a friend in that department, so I was going to go help, but they pulled out of the event for scheduling reasons, and we canceled our booth.” He found the email he’d been searching for at last. “But now I remember noticing on my ticket that the central exhibit this year is a Sanborn maps collection.”