Page 55 of The Librarians

Monday evening

Unless there are special events, Sophie usually doesn’t stay at the library until close. But tonight is an exception. Tonight, she is in the storage room, sorting through things.

Books, stacks, carts—she tries to clear some space in the center of the room and scoot everything closer to the walls.

Books are heavy—little wonder, they used to be trees—and Sophie is grateful for her back brace. After twenty minutes, she sits down for a while to breathe: Her instructions say that she should include some intervals in her sound recording during which she does nothing.

Five minutes later, she gets up: She is also supposed to open boxes. She decides to look at some forgotten donations that have been shoved behind the couch—a layer of dust has accumulated over these boxes.

Low-fat cookbooks from when fat was the enemy. Two dozen Fodor’s travel guides, a decade out of date. A case of audiobooks on cassette—hoo boy, they will either all go to that single reader who still has a real boombox at home or be complete wallflowers at the book sale.

The next box, though…

Underneath a bunch of celebrity memoirs, she spots a copy of Beloved by Toni Morrison. It looks almost new, but the cover—Sophie quickly flips to the copyright page. It is indeed a first edition, first printing copy. And signed too, in the great writer’s loopy script.

Sophie is no rare book dealer, but somewhere out there someone would cough up a couple of Benjamins for this.

She doesn’t know if the branch could open an eBay account but surely it would be a sin—as well as a waste—to let this one go for two dollars, the price of a typical used hardcover at the library.

She sets it aside.

The next book in the box turns out to be a copy of Sense and Sensibility published in the 1820s—definitely not a first edition, but still, ancient enough and spiffy enough to warrant a pretty penny.

She can’t tell the exact publication date of the next two volumes because they are in Chinese, the text arranged vertically. But the dark covers are faded and frayed at the edges, and the bindings are not glued but sewn—they, too, are probably more than a century in age.

The remaining five books in the box comprise poetry by Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, Histoire de ma vie by George Sand—all published toward the end of the nineteenth century—and a third edition copy, dated 1777, of the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

Despite the obvious antiquity of most of the books, they are not nearly costly enough to discharge Hazel’s late husband’s debts—or even buy Sophie’s little town house. But her monthly salary would not be enough to purchase them.

No collector would pack such a valuable reserve into a cardboard box with a bunch of titles by the Real Housewives and dump the whole thing on the library.

Unless…has Sophie found the box of books Hazel’s late husband brought in shortly before he died?

The library

Tuesday Night

Next to the meeting room is a perennially closed door that hardly anyone notices.

Behind it rises a flight of narrow metal steps clad in blue thermoplastic.

The steps lead up to a hidden gallery overlooking the circulation area, which serves as access to ducts and machinery essential for the smooth running of the building.

In the darkness inside the gallery, Hazel sits on a folded blanket, her back against a wall. The air is slightly stale up here, stale and warm. She racks the Glock in her hand.

A similarly deadly sound issues from two feet away.

After saying good night to Sophie and Astrid, Hazel left Astrid’s condo and reached the library twenty minutes ago.

She went into the storage room via the Den of Calories, then out from the storage room’s back door into the bathroom corridor.

Conrad was already there at the corridor’s other end, holding open the door to the hidden gallery.

Hazel has sent the agreed-upon texts to Astrid.

And now Astrid, seated with her back to the camera, will give Sophie the signal and Sophie will press a button on a small device hidden from view.

A pre-produced audio will play and it should sound, to those listening on the other end, as if Astrid and Sophie are on a prolonged call to Hazel, who is looking for El Dorado in the storage room.

The same recording is also playing in the storage room, in case their quarry somehow makes it past all the perimeters without alerting anyone and is at this very moment standing outside the storage room, listening.

But those ambient sounds with bits of conversation spliced in cannot be heard in the hidden gallery, its door shut tight. All Hazel can make out is the occasional low hum of the HVAC and the inevitable pops and creaks of a building cooling and contracting at night.

“No movement in the parking lot,” comes Jonathan’s voice in her ear. “Everything normal so far.”

“Same here,” answers Conrad.

A part of Hazel would feel wretched if after this whole song-and-dance they net nothing. But the other part of her—ninety-nine percent and rising—deeply regrets ever choosing to be more involved than absolutely necessary.

“You okay?” murmurs Conrad.

Their recent conversations all seem to start with this question from him. Hazel exhales and checks the safety on her firearm. “I feel like a damsel in distress in an action movie. Like it’s the Terminator out there or something.”

“Watch your example, Ms. Lee,” admonishes the shadowy silhouette that is her dream lover. “Those movies were before my time, but I’m pretty sure the poor human protector from the first Terminator bites the dust.”

She would laugh if her viscera weren’t compressed to the density of white dwarfs. “What if I compare you to Jason Bourne?”

“Even worse,” he retorts softly. “All Jason Bourne gets for his trouble is his girlfriend shot dead in a tropical paradise.”

Well, shit. “Is there a good action movie that ends happily for everyone involved?”

He is silent for a few seconds. “ Everything Everywhere All at Once ?”

Hazel remembers the movie primarily as the struggle of an immigrant family coming to grips with the everyday trauma and alienation that had come to define them, but there were indeed action sequences—some with dildos and butt plugs, no less.

Not to mention an extravagant, expansive multiverse.

If the multiverse truly exists, there must be at least a few realities in which she never tore up Conrad’s number.

In those realities, did they meet in Charleston, South Carolina, two giddy young people caught off guard by love?

Did she, groupie-like, follow him along the coast of South America, stealing a few hours every time his ship dropped anchor?

And did she dip into the funds her maternal grandmother set aside for her, which she was not supposed to ever touch, to buy her way onto his ship, so that they could sit under starry skies together, as the Pelagios hurtled ever toward the next horizon?

As if he heard her thoughts, he says, “After my father’s funeral, I changed my phone number.”

Her heart stops beating. The sound of her sharply indrawn breath bounces off the too-close walls. So he had given her up, just as she had given him up.

“I wasn’t in a good place—and didn’t believe I ever would be.

” His words are slow and heavy, as if they are underwater wrecks that must be brought up with great care, lest they trap the diver or give him decompression sickness.

“All throughout my second contract on the ship and even during military service afterward, I believed I was right to cut you off, to spare you the person I became.”

People will try. They don’t want to accept that pain is simply a part of life; they still think, after thirty, sixty, or even ninety years on this earth, that something can be done, if not for themselves, then for those they love.

The old pain returns. Not like a knife, but like a fog. A fog of obliterating vapors, the sensation that she will be lost no matter which direction she chooses.

“But for some reason, I never gave up on running into you again—you would not believe the number of botanical gardens I visited. You would not believe how many botanical gardens there are under the sun. Except I always thought that I wouldn’t say hi when I eventually saw you.

I would simply watch you go by, husband and children in tow, and that would have to be good enough. ”

She clutches the Glock in her hand as if it were the last flower in a desert world.

“You’d think, given my certainty that I had not seen the last of you, that I would have been better prepared to come across your wedding photos.

But I was…shell-shocked. Perry sat next to me, theorizing endlessly about why Kit did what he did, and all I could think was that you finally became what you were running away from. ”

She bites into her lower lip. She had, hadn’t she? Where had all the secret determination to remain herself gone? Certainly on the day of her wedding she had been completely subsumed by her identity—and performance—as Bartholomew Kuang’s granddaughter.

“I thought that glossy version of me was your ideal woman.”

“I was—obsessed with her. But…”

Is their underwater wreckage so tricky that he’s not even sure where to attach cables? He sighs. In the darkness, with him close enough to touch yet somehow unreachable, she has the sensation that he is speaking to himself, and she is only the accidental eavesdropper.

“But I was also obsessed with my father after his scandal came to light. I went through every single record he left behind—much as I did with everything I could find out about you.”

Was he engaged in emotional forensics—piecing together all the evidence so he could figure out how to feel? Or had he already decided how he felt and was simply looking to shore up his beliefs?