Page 66 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 the Pelagios .

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 the Pelagios ’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 biscuits and Taiwanese 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.”

He lifts a thick section and flips it back, and the book—well trained to, apparently—opens exactly to a photograph of Hazel—three, in fact.

She is climbing up a steep street in a white Cape Verde T-shirt, a pair of camo cargo shorts, and, of course, that gigantic visor.

Yet somehow, through his lens, she doesn’t look dorky but rather cool and breezy.

“When did you take these pictures?”

“When you were busy texting on your phone. I was looking for a panoramic shot though, not to creep on you.” He sighs. “But then I saw you.”

She raises a brow. “Are you going to tell me you weren’t lost?”

“Not only was I not lost, I’d already walked around the botanical garden and left.”

“I knew you were hitting on me.” She really did.

He smiles down at the coffee table. “Thanks for letting me. I was—I don’t think it was love at first sight, but I was struck by this impossible curiosity about you.”

He turns two pages and there she is again, laughing uproariously at the ginormous beef skewer that has just been put on the table between them.

“Huh,” she says. “I have a vague memory of you with your camera out at this point. I thought you were taking pictures of the beef skewer.”

“Well, the beef skewer is there.”

As foreground for her thorough hilarity. Come to think of it, she doesn’t know if she’s ever been captured in another picture laughing so hard, having such a good time.

“So you always had pictures of me,” she murmurs. “I kind of forgot what you looked like, but…”

She opens her carryall and digs out a small box. “I remembered that you had pierced cartilage. So I got you an ear barbell every year for your birthday—except during the time I was married.”

He looks at her, opens the box, and then looks back at her in astonishment. “I thought you meant some goth trinkets. These are—museum quality.”

“It’s nice to have visuals when I beat myself up over my mistake,” Hazel answers, half-joking. She reaches into the carryall again and extracts a glass jar. “I also made these for you, one hundred every year, even when I was married.”

The jar contains tiny lucky stars. The ones in this jar are folded from strips of pastel pearlized paper and shimmer with an iridescent sheen.

“I have a whole shelf of those jars in Singapore. I didn’t bring them all.”

He turns the jar in his hand and regards it with a fierce concentration. The soft-hued lucky stars inside shift and glide against one another.

“All I have is a jar of botanical garden tickets, at least three of them from Singapore,” he says quietly. Then, after a moment, “And that.”

He points to the large ship in a bottle that she noticed on her first visit because it’s so intricately detailed that it has a sailor throwing a message in a bottle overboard. “Remember I changed my number?”

How can she forget?

“The message in the bottle has my new number—not the best way to give it to you, is it?”

No one speaks. After some time, she realizes that they are no longer almost touching, that somehow, in the giving and receiving of gifts accumulated over the years, they moved apart.

She casts about for something to say. “Where’s Ryan?”

“Jonathan’s hosting a poetry slam somewhere up north. Ryan will be in attendance.”

This makes Hazel smile despite her uneasiness. “Ryan has it bad—but then again, so does Jonathan.”

Conrad smiles likewise. “Last night I got home from the airport at about midnight and ran into Jonathan in the kitchen. Never seen a grown man blush like that. It was cute.”

“So tonight Ryan will be at Jonathan’s place.” Hazel bites her lower lip.

“I imagine,” says Conrad. He caresses the shoulder of the jar of lucky stars with his thumb.

She feels electrical currents zigzag across her shoulders. “Do you want to—”

Conrad glances up at her.

“—hear about the restitution of your three million pounds?”

He keeps looking at her. Then he sets down the lucky stars on the coffee table. Hazel’s heart thuds.

“I would love to,” he says, “in forty-eight hours.”

“What are you planning to do for the next forty-eight hours?”

He looks her in the eye, his amber gaze unwavering. “You.”

She is hot all over. What are you waiting for? But he is waiting for something, just as she is.

“That night at the library—” she begins.

Memories of that night have rushed back to her many times since, hugging herself in simmering anxiety after he left to reinforce Jonathan, pushing open the emergency exit to the rapid-fire popping of a machine gun, her feet as heavy as fifty-pound weights, slugging it out with Alina Kadeev in a white-hot haze of fury and desperation, not realizing until much later that she’d scraped her arm and bled through her sleeve.

But what she recalled most of all was sitting in the dark with him in silence, the trace of light creeping in from the view window to the circulation area just enough to delineate his silhouette. The greasy, slightly overwarm air. The thrum of the HVAC. And then, his words.

After my father’s funeral, I changed my phone number. You finally became what you were running away from. It’s enough that you know.