Page 75 of The Librarians

“This is really interesting and complex, but not in a way that hurts your brain,” she says to Elise as they pack up.

“I know, right? The props are cute, but it’s the gameplay that’s really propulsive.” Elise hugs the box to her chest. “I love it. And thank you so much for playing with me!”

“Oh, gosh, don’t thank me. I might not leave now—I might just squat here to play games.”

“Don’t say that, Astrid, or Elise will start praying for the carpenter ants in your neighbor’s foundation never to go away!”

They all chortle at that. Elise bounces upstairs, humming a tune that Sophie is too out of pop culture to recognize.

“Come on,” Sophie says to Astrid, “let’s go for a walk. It’ll be dark soon.”

“Ooh, on the golf course?”

Sophie’s town house is situated in a cluster of tightly packed units at the edge of a sprawling neighborhood of single-family homes. And her front door, much to Astrid’s—and frankly Sophie’s own—marvel, opens onto a golf course.

From her tiny porch, they step almost directly onto the ribbon of asphalt originally intended for golf carts. The sun is low in the sky, the wind is rising, but it’s not cold yet and a lager-pale light drizzles upon a long expanse of tall grass. In the distance there are trees and in the even greater distance the land dips and rises again in a broad green slope.

The country club stopped watering the course several droughts ago. And it was thanks to the golf course falling into disuse—not to mention depressed real estate prices in the wake of the subprime meltdown—that Sophie was able to afford the town house on her librarian’s salary.

She loves the view: golden grass undulating in the breeze, dark green clusters of ash juniper, a grazing family of deer scattering upon their approach.

“Wow,” exclaims Astrid. “Everybody always tells me that Austin is full of deer, but it’s the first time I’ve seen so many at once.”

“Good thing I’m not a gardener.” Sophie laughs a little. “I love deer as wildlife but gardeners around here have to jump through hoops to make sure their plants don’t get eaten.”

The path dips and they enter a small green tunnel made by tree branches meeting overhead.

Astrid turns toward Sophie. “You’ve built a good life for yourself and Elise. You really have, Sophie.”

Sophie knows this. Of course she knows this. But to hear it after days of relentless self-castigation…

“Thank you,” she says, a catch in her voice. She desperately needed to be reminded that while she might have put her foot in it on Game Night, she has not, by and large, messed up either her own life or Elise’s. “Thank you, Astrid. It means a lot to me.”

And then, not wanting either of them to feel too self-conscious, she keeps talking. “But it’s been good for me, too, to be Elise’s mother. Left to my own devices, I probably would have been a hermit.”

But she couldn’t have inflicted such isolation on Jo-Ann’s daughter. Jo-Ann would have been the pillar of any community. She would have hosted neighborhood barbecues, organized school supply donations, and given out dozens of rum cakes at Christmas. Everyone would have known and loved Jo-Ann and everyone would have cared about her kid.

Sophie, nowhere near as extraverted as Jo-Ann, nevertheless served as school crossing guard when Elise was little, coached Elise’s soccer teams even though she was a track-and-field athlete and not a team sport player, and to this day is still involved with the HOA.

And in this area, where the Claremonts are demographic outliers, all her neighbors know and love Elise.

A pair of young does dash across the man-made prairie, leap through someone’s unfenced yard, and disappear into the residential street beyond.

“Can I ask you a question, Sophie?”

The wind tousles Astrid’s red-streaked hair. Her eyes shine with curiosity and—a second passes before Sophie recognizes it as admiration. Astrid has always approached Sophie with deference, but Sophie had attributed it to a girl from overseas feeling intimidated by a no-nonsense Black woman.

Now Sophie’s shield of invincibility lies in shards, yet the warm acclaim in Astrid’s gaze remains undimmed.

“Sure, go ahead.”

“I was—I was trying to escape my pretense, but you needed to make yours a permanent reality. I guess my question is, when did this stop being a pretense for you?”

On the drive from the library to Sophie’s place, Astrid told Sophie the reason she no longer has a Swedish accent—that she was never Swedish to begin with.

Sophie glances back in the direction of her house, the direction of her reality. “In one sense, it became all too real right away—in the criminal sense, I guess. I could go to jail for my impulsive decision to honor Jo-Ann’s wishes.

“As for when I started to think of Elise not as Jo-Ann’s child but my own, that took a good bit longer.”