Page 59 of The Librarians
She almost doesn’t dare dive into Perry’s notes to her, but after a couple of scones and two cups of tea—liquid courage for librarians—she pulls out those sheets of paper and reads, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, all the communication she will ever have from this man.
After eight different attempts to make her understand why he did what he did, he seemed to have given up on the ninth try.
Dear Astrid,
It’s no use. In my mind, you’ve already moved on—because what man with half a brain wouldn’t want you in his life? I’m too late and whatever apology I can offer at this point will always be insufficient.
And I have no one to blame but myself—the bitterest pill to swallow.
It’s raining here—hardly surprising as it’s October in London.
The city is gray, noisy, and unlovely. But sometimes, when I’m out and about, I think of how a dull, ordinary street would have looked to you, had you come for a visit.
Maybe you would have thought it equally dismal.
Or maybe you would have seen fresh, interesting details that I long ago stopped noticing.
In any case, I would have liked to see my city—my country—through your eyes.
I’ve taken to frequenting the two public libraries closest to my flat—did you know London has over three hundred libraries spread across its thirty-two boroughs?
Neither did I—I was never much of a reader, let alone a patron of libraries.
But I so relished those quiet hours in your library that I’ve been trying to replicate that peace and contentment.
It’s not the same, of course, yet I do feel a little closer to you when I wander the stacks. I’ve even been making my way through your recommendations—found them on your library’s blog. Last week, I read one of your favorites, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and am still thinking about it.
Had I known the consequences of approaching you that afternoon outside the library, would I still have done it? For your sake, probably not. But if I had only myself to consider, then yes, despite how difficult these weeks and months have been, I would still have held on to those scant days.
I would still have fallen in love.
Next time I’m in the library, I will borrow the movie version of the story and
The note ends abruptly on that conjuncture. Greedily, Astrid reads it again, but it still ends in the same place, with the same unsettling, unfinished finality.
Her tears fall.
So many emotions—in such overwhelming quantities—have besieged her, like the legions of Mordor coming to sack Minas Tirith. Yet her tear ducts have remained stubbornly dry, even as the walls of her city fell into ruin. She couldn’t cry—at least not for Perry.
But now, because she will never know what else he meant to say—or if he himself had ever finished the thought—she weeps.
For what seems like days.
When she stops, she slips into a nearby powder room to wash her face and freshen up. Then she finds Conrad in the kitchen, straining a thick, buttery-looking liquid.
“Can I help?” she offers. “What are you making?”
“Crème br?lée.”
“Wow, just like that?”
He smiles. “I’ve invited your colleagues and my roommate for dinner—to celebrate the relative success of Entrapment Night. Hazel’s grandmother actually instructed me to trash the place by having a legendary party—she is going to be disappointed.”
Conrad studies her a moment. “You are, of course, invited too. But if you’d prefer to be by yourself…”
For a moment Astrid thinks seriously of declining. But she recalls her red-rimmed eyes in the powder-room mirror. She’s been alone so much already—why choose more seclusion when she finally has friends, wonderful friends?
“I’ll stay,” she tells him.
She is glad to see Ryan when he saunters in. And when Jonathan and Sophie arrive together, she runs to greet them, wallowing in Jonathan’s mountainlike hug and then glorying in an equally sustained embrace from Sophie.
“You all right?” asks Sophie.
“I will be,” Astrid whispers back. “I can feel it.”
While Conrad finishes things up in the kitchen, Ryan entertains them with an account of a blue-black bruise on Conrad’s chest that Ryan is sure resulted from a physical altercation between Conrad and Hazel the night Hazel stole into Conrad’s house.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” says Ryan. “Take a look at this.”
The guests gather around the dining table. This is infrared footage from the night of the firefight. The camera was placed on a tree near the front of the library, at a perfect angle to capture Hazel sneaking up on the fake Ayesha Khan.
Astrid heard from Jonathan about the unexpected but crucial role Hazel played, but even Jonathan is surprised to see that after the fake Ayesha Khan went down the first time, there was a vicious bout of hand-to-hand combat behind the CRV.
Astrid feels as if her own skull is cracking as she watches the two women slug it out before Hazel emerges victorious.
“You’re lucky she didn’t break a few of your ribs last Sunday!” Ryan calls to Conrad, still in the kitchen.
“What can I say, she loves me too much,” replies Conrad, walking into the dining room with a large salad bowl and the enviable confidence of a man who has decided on his path.
Dinner is green salad in vinaigrette, a rib-sticking cassoulet with crusty bread—perfect for the first real cold front of the year—and rich, silky ramekins of crème br?lée that Astrid torched under Conrad’s supervision.
After they clear all the dishes and load the dishwasher, the company returns to the dining room with coffee and cocktails and talk about everything under the sun. Astrid has never been so sad in the midst of such a wonderful evening, and never so glad to be alive.
When Ryan asks if anyone wants to play a board game, she is the first one to say yes.
She decides, at the same moment, that when she returns home, she will watch the movie version of “Story of Your Life” again.
That from now on, it will always be their movie, hers and Perry’s.