Page 129 of The Librarians

There is no one at Conrad’s house.

Hazel texted him from five minutes away. He unlocked the gate and the front door remotely, but said he wouldn’t be back for a quarter hour. Hazel pokes her head into the alcove for a moment—it’s still pretty—and heads to the library for something to read.

There is already an oversize book sitting on the tree-slab coffee table, no dust jacket, no title on the solid blue cover. On the first page is the image of a large catamaran in port, its sails furled.

She hesitates a little and turns the page. Captions are sparse, but the dates affixed here and there confirm that this is a record of Conrad’s time on thePelagios.

Most of the photographs are of the sea, the ports, and sometimes the interior of the ship, which is richly appointed, as expected of an expensive private yacht. A month in, after various islands in the Aegean Sea, there is finally a picture of Conrad, leaning over one of thePelagios’s bows. Hazel must have been blind, thinking him only cute. He was already beautiful then, tall and long-limbed, jawline sharp enough to cut glass, smile brilliant against healthy, tanned skin.

Pain plucks at her heart—this was him in the age of innocence, before his father’s death. She flips the book to its midpoint and lands on a funeral under a leaden sky. There is a shot of him from behind, bareheaded, the edges of his long, black coat flying in the wind.

In the wake of the funeral, he became a better photographer—or perhaps he’d improved steadily in the months she’s skipped over. But the nature of the photos changes. There are many more images of rain and storms. The sea seems colder, crueler.

The first post-funeral image of him comes after two months or so. Someone took a snap of him cooking in the galley. He looks up, a huge pot in front of him, his young face expressionless, shuttered.

The next shot of him is dated a few weeks later. He is trimming sails with a scowl of concentration, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips.

She comes upon a photograph of what must be his cabin—tiny and coffin-like, as he described—but wow, teenage-boy messy. She leans in. Is that the postcard of the Madeira Botanical Garden that he’d taped to his wall?

Some instinct makes her stand up and head for the terrace outside the library, just in time to see a single scull pull up to the boathouse at the edge of the property. Conrad, in a windbreaker and a pair of shorts, leaps up, stows the oars, and lifts the scull into the boathouse.

Then he sprints out of the boathouse and, halfway across the garden, finally spotting her at the balustrade, comes to an abrupt halt.

“Hi!” he says, smiling.

He is happy to see her and she is…strangely moved by that happiness.

He resumes walking and comes up to the terrace. “You should’ve told me you were coming. I’d have been waiting for you.”

“Nainai didn’t tell you I was coming?” By unspoken agreement they have refrained from electronic forms of communication, but he has been in touch with Nainai.

“Guess she didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” His smile becomes even more buoyant. “I like the surprise.”

She certainly has no complaints about the surprise of seeing him post-workout, glowing with health and vitality. And those shorts show off some seriously glorious quads.

He pulls open the door for her to enter the house. “Let me take a quick shower. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

But he doesn’t depart upstairs until he’s poured her a glass of water and loaded a plate with French butter biscuitsandTaiwanese wife cakes.

She eats one of each, smiling to herself all the while. Even the water tastes sweet, as if it formed when the world’s hydrogen and oxygen atoms first met to produce the most life-giving elixir in the universe.

Her phone dings. She deletes a dozen emails and realizes that she missed one from her grandfather’s people earlier. Even without opening the email, the two first lines of its content that show in the inbox make her cover her mouth with her hand.

She has just returned to the living room library and sat down when Conrad enters in a lightweight black sweater and a pair of black slacks that unfortunately show no quad at all.

“Did you see it?” he asks.

She looks at him askance. “If you mean your chaotic cabin, yes.”

“Oh, God. I swear, the marines beat the messiness out of me.”

He sits down next to her. Other than when they were grappling—or kissing—that one time in bed, or when he pulled her in to kiss her forehead right before they faced mortal danger, he’s kept her at a literal arm’s length ever since Peng’s Noodles.

Now they very nearly touch from ankle to shoulder. And whatever he used in the shower smells divine, like Scandinavian rain.

“What I meant was,” he says, “did you see the section on Madeira?”

“Not yet.”