Page 30 of The Librarians

Jonathan walks into his living room, puts his phone to charge, and falls on the couch. Chimney, his tabby, tiptoes onto his stomach and makes himself comfortable.

“Hey, big fella,” he says absently, caressing Chimney’s head.

Chimney, his eyes wide, stares at Jonathan.

“Must you gaze into the depths of my soul?” Jonathan murmurs. “Why can’t you just be my superior overlord?”

Most cats regard humans with varying degrees of condescension. Chimney, for some reason, has world-weary eyes that seem to say, I’ve been there too, buddy, and I know how you feel.

Jonathan sighs. “I feel sad. There, I can admit it, my feline counselor—I feel sad.”

Maybe this sadness is easier to acknowledge because it’s about Hazel. He remembers her euphoria this afternoon. A moment of such deep, intense, transparent emotion that he has to believe it was a glimpse into her real self, beneath all that ingrained low-keyness.

But this evening she was again a kindly observer, rather than a participant, of life.

And the pain that coiled around his heart was completely out of proportion to his recent and very slight connection to her.

“We all need fairy tales,” he tells Chimney.

Okay, maybe not everyone. Some people are perfectly fine believing that the world is going to hell in a Wi-Fi-enabled handbasket. But everyone else, or at least Jonathan, still wants some reassurance that there is a point to all this striving, all this confusion, all this existential melancholy.

And if not for himself, then for someone more deserving—after all, happy endings are never given out willy-nilly, but only to the select few, the unimpeachably worthy.

It hurts to be reminded so bluntly that life is hard and love near nigh impossible.

It shakes him to the core that all the hopes Hazel has carried over the years could extinguish in the blink of the eye.

There was a moment, in that almost mythically beautiful library of a living room, when Hazel caressed a glass jar of ticket stubs and a lump formed in his throat at the longing in her simple gesture.

He knows, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, that much of the sadness is for himself too. For his impossible dream with Ryan.

Chimney climbs up and nestles his head in the crook of Jonathan’s shoulder. Jonathan rubs his cheek against Chimney’s warm, smooth fur. “At least I have you,” he says, his voice thick. “At least I have you.”

A sheriff’s car is parked outside Twin Courtyards Apartments.

Sophie curses under her breath.

Jeannette Obermann’s case is being handled by city police, not the county sheriff. So the sheriff’s car, which doesn’t have its light bar on, could be anything from an off-duty officer visiting a friend to an off-duty car parked there specifically to deter crime.

But still, Sophie drives away without going inside.

If she were white, would she have simply walked into the management office and said that she was Jeannette Obermann’s friend/colleague/sister, and could she please have access to Jeannette’s apartment to sort out her things?

She doesn’t know.

All she knows is that she has no idea whether she ought to try something desperate that could get her arrested today, or to keep her head down until Hagerty comes for her with the deceased’s phone records.

She drives back home.

Elise is at a birthday party sleepover. Sophie gives herself a matte burgundy manicure, with a thin strip of gold above each lunula.

Normally she enjoys having her house to herself once in a while, and she dearly loves a well-executed manicure.

But tonight, as she stares at her newly perfect nails, she can’t help but feel that she’s just visited the spa on the Titanic .

She still has several months before the police get their hands on Jeannette Obermann’s phone records, right?

She fishes the reformatted Chromebook out from the bottom of her closet, turns it on, and ignores nagging questions in her head about the wisdom of using it on her own Wi-Fi.

She’s deleted her browsing history at the end of every session on this notebook, but it doesn’t take long before she finds the article she’s looking for.

She taps the article open, scans the lines, and freezes.

The key sentence doesn’t say it takes “months” for the phone companies to cough up records. It says “several days to several months, depending on the circumstances.”

How many days has it been since Jeannette Obermann’s body was discovered? The police may already have her phone records. Or, if not yet, they will obtain them any day now.

What is Sophie going to do the next time Detective Hagerty demands to see her?

Even on that day sixteen years ago, standing in the hospital, feeling as if someone had strapped a hundred-pound backpack to her shoulders, she didn’t feel quite so alone as she does now.

She still had her mother, then. And she had Eileen Su, Jo-Ann’s best friend from law school—Eileen had cousins who knew people and those connections netted a birth certificate for Elise with Sophie as her birth mother.

But Aubrey Claremont passed away four years ago. And Sophie did not contact Eileen again after she and Elise moved to Austin—she was still terrified of being found out in those early years and the last thing she wanted to do was to bring down Eileen too, while she was at it.

Since then she’s kept Elise and herself safe by not getting too close to anyone—or at least that was what she thought she was doing. Only to end up not safe, and without allies.

Waking up at two thirty in the morning sucks.

Astrid reaches toward her nightstand and groans: She forgot to bring a glass of water. She closes her eyes. Maybe she’ll fall asleep again. Then she won’t care that she’s thirsty.

But now she notices she’s also cold. Wait a minute, did she fall asleep on top of the covers? Yes, she did. After the library closed, she came home, ate a sandwich, and then settled down on her bed to do French-language searches.

She worried about swimming in a sea of Google-translated gobbledygook, but machine translation—at least for straightforward, journalistic language—has become more or less readable.

Her problem remained the same: the scarcity of usable results.

All she has to show for her detective work—which literally put her to sleep—are some biographical details of an old, dead French diplomat named Valerian de Villiers.

He led an interesting, globe-trotting life but breathed his last twenty years ago, so he couldn’t have been Perry’s business partner.

Astrid yawns and rolls off her bed. She might as well tidy away her laptop and get some water, and then take off her clothes and crawl under the covers.

After she plugs in the laptop on her dining table, she turns around. The front of her condo features a large window to either side of the door. By falling asleep unceremoniously, she neglected to draw the curtains shut.

A silhouette appears against the sheers. Astrid starts. The silhouette moves and disappears behind the door. After a brief silence, she hears faint but distinctly metallic scratches.

The situation is so irregular that she simply stares. Only then does alarm slam into her. Someone is trying to break into her house!

She covers her mouth. Her phone. Where is her phone?

She can’t think, but her body takes over. Her feet march to the utility room deeper inside the condo; her hands reach up and yank down the attic ladder. She climbs up, draws the ladder back up and pulls the entire hatch door shut as tight as possible.

When she was a little girl, she was traumatized by the first zombie movie she saw.

The idea of her parents becoming the undead and coming to devour her made her demand that they always speak in full sentences as soon as they saw her.

And then she spent days figuring out where she would be safest in the event the house was overrun.

In the end, she decided on the attic, because zombies didn’t seem to look up very much. What she would do after she’d shut herself off in the attic, she didn’t quite think through. But wherever she stayed from then on she always knew the way to the attic or the roof.

The wooden beams she lies on, spaced six inches apart, dig into all the wrong places on her body. The house is eerily quiet. The silence makes her think of that movie in which aliens pounce on anyone who makes the least sound.

Her heart thumps. She doesn’t dare move, except to cover her face with her sleeve so she won’t breathe in dust and sneeze at the worst possible moment.

Wait, but why did she come up here in the first place?

Now she’s stuck. Her condo doesn’t have a garage, but it does have a back door, accessible right through the utility room.

She should have just gone out. And if she had any presence of mind, she could have even put on the old sneakers she keeps next to the dryer.

In the darkness, it becomes impossible to draw enough air through the fabric over her nose and mouth. She’s chilled to the bone— and perspiring freely. She can’t breathe and yet she breathes all too loudly, sibilant whooshes ricocheting against the unimproved interior of the attic.

Just when she thinks she can’t take it anymore, the door to the utility room opens. Fear seizes her. Whimpers gurgle in her throat; she swallows them, sick to her stomach.

Now fear is a shriek rising from her lungs. She grits her teeth together. Her hands grip rough wood. Her knees shake. She lifts them up so they won’t knock against the beams, and her calves scream with strain.

The door closes. Heavy tears spill down her cheeks, but not tears of relief.

The intruder could still be in the utility room, simply with the door closed.

And that would mean he has homed in on her location.

What would he do? Would he come up or simply wait for her adrenal response to overthrow her self-control?