The Lions of Fifth Avenue: A Novel

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

New York City, 1993

With only four days until the exhibit opened, Sadie was more nervous than excited. She’d worked so hard on this, yet it wasn’t quite right, and she wanted it to be perfect.

She’d been allowed to come back to work right after the arrests of Richard Jones-Ebbing and Robin Larkin. Dr. Hooper wasn’t thrilled about Sadie’s connection to the thief, but the fact that he’d placed Robin’s coconspirator on the board of the library meant that he had to shoulder some of the blame himself. Sadie made sure to push that fact when they met to discuss the terms of her return, and had been reinstated as curator of the exhibit.

Inside the exhibit hall, Sadie stared out over the display cases where the best of the Berg Collection sat opened to their most important pages, like a bunch of literary peacocks. She took the tour as if she were a visitor, new to all this. To start, there was the First Folio. The title page had been carefully laid into the correct position, but not affixed. It couldn’t just be glued back; the damage was permanent. Heartbreaking, indeed. The description next to it stated as much.

A 1719 copy of Robinson Crusoe included a vivid illustration of the title character, and next to that was her beloved Tamerlane. Its label stated that the anonymous author listed on the cover—By a Bostonian—was indeed Poe, and mentioned that the volume had been recently rediscovered. If only Sadie had more than six lines to describe the book’s journey.

The exhibit itself was a journey of sorts, of letters, manuscripts, and books, of poets and writers, Austen and Tennyson and Yeats. To have them all assembled in one room was a dream. It was as if she’d summoned the very ghosts themselves to chatter with each other, compare edits and changes, remark on the elegant bindings. The exhibit almost made up for the ordeal she and her family had gone through the past few months. Almost, but not quite.

The case against Robin was still making its way through the court system. The prosecutor had warned Sadie not to get her hopes up, that judges didn’t view valuable books the way they might a painting or other item taken from a museum. In fact, the typical sentence was less than three years in jail.

Sadie had asked to speak at the sentencing, in the hopes of pleading their case, but so far hadn’t heard anything back. She made a mental note to bother the prosecutor again tomorrow.

There was still no understanding of how Robin knew about the dumbwaiter system in the library. The original floor plan of the building hadn’t been checked out for years. Sadie had called Miss Quinn in London to ask if she knew of the girl, but no luck there, either. It was as if she’d sprung out of nowhere, insinuated herself into Sadie’s family, and then taken advantage. Richard Jones-Ebbing had pleaded guilty right away and volunteered all the information he could about Robin, but it didn’t add up to much.

Lonnie, LuAnn, and Sadie had brought Valentina back to the library a few weeks after her overnight adventure, hoping to ease any lingering trauma. She’d proudly shown them where she’d hidden out in the nook in the Reading Room; then she’d skipped down the main stairway to the basement, where Mr. Babenko had found her and taken such good care of her.

In the exhibit hall, Sadie stopped in front of Laura Lyons’s walking stick, displayed between Dickens’s cat-paw letter opener and Charlotte Brontë’s writing kit. The nonliterary choices gave the attendees’ eyes a rest from the printed page, and also helped humanize the authors as actual people who opened letters and walked and traveled. Souls who’d accomplished amazing things during their lifetimes, and were more than just a litany of names from high school English class.

She unlocked the display case and lifted out the walking stick, wishing again they had an original piece of writing from Laura Lyons to include, not just the old library newsletters. She ran her fingers over the curve of the wood. Her grandmother had put her own hand there, gripped the stick as she made her way across London, to her death. According to Miss Quinn, she’d been found still clutching it, surrounded by debris.

In her most recent call with Miss Quinn, the woman had volunteered that the walking stick, which Laura never left home without, had been a gift from Amelia Potter. By now, Miss Quinn had become a confidante of sorts, and regaled Sadie with stories of Laura and Amelia taking weekend trips to Brighton in the warmer months, of hosting dinner parties that dissolved into laughter and song. Even though they kept separate residences, they were rarely out of each other’s sight, staying together in one place or the other. It made Sadie happy to learn that her grandmother had been loved, and she’d changed the label on the case to reflect that new information.

“Laura never left home without it,” Miss Quinn had said.

Sadie paused. Wasn’t that the same thing that Laura Lyons had said about the essay she mentioned to Miss Quinn before her death? It told the truth, and . . . for now she always carried it with her.

She regarded the walking stick again, remembering the ones she’d seen on television or in the movies with flasks or knives hidden inside. Holding it up to the light, she examined its handle, looking for any edges where it might come apart. Nothing. The wood was smooth, with no signs of separation.

She turned it upside down. The very bottom was worn, but in the middle, there appeared to be a kind of stopper made from a similar wood, so that it was hardly noticeable.

What to do? This was a valuable artifact. If she dug her nail in to try to wedge it out, she might damage the stick.

But Sadie couldn’t help herself. She had to see if the plug could be removed. She wouldn’t do anything drastic, not use a screwdriver on it, for example, but if her fingernail could loosen it a little . . .

It popped off, landing with a click on the floor and rolling to a stop by her shoe. Sadie bent down and picked it up, placing it carefully on top of the display case.

She peered inside the opening of the cane and could barely make out the edges of a piece of paper rolled up inside.

Laura Lyons’s final essay. The one she always carried with her.

Sadie knew she shouldn’t attempt this alone. She picked up the plug and the cane and went back into the Berg Collection’s main room, where Claude looked up with concern. Since Sadie had returned to her job, they’d reached a lukewarm détente, both eager to move forward and focus on mounting a successful exhibit. Their alignment of interests had smoothed over their previous troubles.

“Should you be handling that without gloves?” he asked. “Why is it out of the case?”

“I think I found something strange. I need your help.”

She explained about the plug, saying that she’d noticed it was sticking out and that it had fallen off when she lifted the walking stick. Just a white lie. At least she’d stopped herself from examining it alone.

By the time she’d finished speaking, Claude was practically salivating. “What do we do?”

“We should bring it downstairs, to Mr. Babenko. He might have the tools to get it out without damaging the paper or the cane.”

As they walked down the three flights of stairs, Sadie gathered up her courage. “Claude, I want to apologize about the way I behaved, after the Christmas party. I was rude to you, and I’m sorry about that.”

There, she’d said it. She waited as Claude absorbed the change in the air between them, the sudden intimacy her words had created. He cleared his throat. “And I’m sorry to have lashed out at you like that. We were both worried about the collection, and under pressure. But it wasn’t very nice. I’m sorry.”

“Can we be friends?” She snuck a glance at him.

“I’d like that very much.”

At that, a weight lifted from Sadie that she didn’t realize she’d been carrying. How silly she’d been to not have had this conversation back in January, but she was learning. Learning how to be clear, to express what she was thinking without worrying it was wrong or stupid. To take up space and not apologize for it.

In the basement, Mr. Babenko approached the project with a careful enthusiasm, finding a pair of tweezers with rubber tips that wouldn’t tear the paper.

“What if it’s just an old shopping list?” joked Claude.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Sadie. “Laura Lyons, getting the last laugh.”

The paper slipped out, and as Sadie held her breath, Mr. Babenko gently unrolled it, placing weights at each corner to hold it flat. The paper had turned yellow but wasn’t cracked, and Sadie recognized Laura Lyons’s signature at the bottom. This was no shopping list.

The note was filled with tiny handwriting, and dated not long before Laura’s death.

A valuable book by Poe sits in a dark, unused dumbwaiter in the superintendent’s apartment of the New York Public Library. Although my husband took the blame before killing himself, the true thief was my son. I will do anything I can to protect him, so while my boy is alive, I will never tell a soul. Yet I can’t bear the thought of it being lost forever, and I write this to try to absolve some of my terrible guilt at keeping such a secret. This has been weighing on me deeply. I hope one day the truth will come out, and the book will be rescued.

So Laura Lyons’s son—Sadie’s uncle, Harry—had been the culprit back in 1914, not Sadie’s grandfather. In the note, Laura explained that it had all begun when Harry burned his father’s manuscript, a book that he’d been writing for years, but that it was all ultimately her fault, that her own actions had initiated a cascade of tragedies.

The burning book. Not a rare manuscript, an unpublished one.

While my boy is alive, I will never tell a soul, Laura had written.

But Sadie’s uncle Harry had died of typhoid in his teens. At least, that’s what Pearl had told Sadie and Lonnie. Or had Laura lied to her daughter in order to make a clean break prior to their move overseas? Sadie’s head spun.

“We have to include this in the exhibit,” said Claude. “Is it too late?”

“It’s definitely too late for the catalog,” said Sadie.

“What if we include an insert, like they do in theater playbills when there’s an understudy?”

Sadie snapped her fingers. “Great idea. Bring these back upstairs and get them safely in the display case. I’ll work on the language for the insert when I’m back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find some answers.”

The exhibit opened with a bang, with glowing write-ups in all the national newspapers and even a segment on 60 Minutes, where Sadie spoke of the importance of the books and, with Dr. Hooper’s permission, the backstory of the thefts and Sadie’s personal connection to Laura Lyons. It was a juicy story, so juicy that even Dr. Hooper didn’t mind the exposure, not with lines out the door to view the exhibit every day, and new donors offering to support the collection every week. Sadie explained to Lesley Stahl that in a way, the robbery had made the books come alive, become part of our current conversation, instead of remaining inanimate, historical archives. Stahl seemed to really like that.

At the opening-night reception, Sadie took a break from accepting congratulations from her colleagues and hung back in a corner, observing the crowd. In the center of the room, Dr. Hooper was guiding several board members through the exhibit, while nearby, Lonnie, LuAnn, and Valentina stared into the case containing Laura Lyons’s cane, as Lonnie animatedly explained the story of the secret hiding place to Valentina, whose eyes were huge.

“Hey there.”

She turned to see Nick in the doorway, holding two glasses of champagne in his hands. He was dressed in a black suit with a sea-blue tie that matched his eyes. “Care to join me?”

She followed him out into the hallway, where waiters were passing trays of food to the guests who had assembled in the McGraw Rotunda.

Nick handed her a glass and pointed up to the mural on the ceiling. “Who’s the tough guy with the sparkler?”

“That would be Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind.”

“Brave soul.”

“Zeus didn’t think so. He punished him big-time. Chained him to a rock, ordered a bird to eat his liver, that kind of thing.”

He cringed. “Glad the painter decided to skip that half of the story. Not sure I could stomach it.”

“Probably wouldn’t go over very well with the library’s visitors, either. Not exactly the message we want to get across.”

“Although it might deter future book thieves.”

“Good point.”

Nick cocked his head toward the exhibit hall. “I saw Dr. Hooper earlier and he was practically levitating, he was so giddy. You’ve done it, Sadie.”

“It was a team effort. Including you, of course.”

They locked eyes, and neither looked away.

Sadie considered her choices. She could put him off, the way she’d done with Claude, and stay safe from harm. Or she could take a leap and pursue him, allow herself to be pursued, and possibly end up hurt and betrayed. Laura Lyons had taken the risk with Amelia Potter. After losing so much more than Sadie had, she’d been able to open up and love someone again. Sadie was certain she could, too. Her future was in her hands, a book yet to be written. How she chose to fill its pages was entirely up to her.

“Sadie, tomorrow night, at the Village Vanguard, there’s a—”

“Yes. I’d love to.”

He laughed. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Whatever it is, there will be music and you. A winning combination.”

“We are a winning combination, Sadie. Don’t forget that.” His face was lit up from within, boyish, and Sadie’s heart swelled. She wished she had a camera to capture his expression. He stepped closer. “We’ll have a good time, I promise. By the way, how is your follow-up research going, into Robin’s past?”

She’d described, in vague terms, her hunt to uncover Robin’s connection to the library, but wasn’t ready to disclose anything just yet. She’d fill him in once she had the proof she was seeking. “I’m close, I’m sure.”

Just then, Dr. Hooper and the other guests spilled into the rotunda, and a spoon was clinked on a champagne glass. Sadie and Nick stood side by side, arms touching, as the speeches began.

Sadie was granted permission to speak before Robin’s sentencing, which the lawyers predicted would be between thirty and thirty-seven months for the crime.

“Don’t be nervous, you’ll do great,” said Nick as they took their seats in the courtroom. He’d come partly to offer her support, and also as a security guard for the large box she kept on her lap, even though there was more than enough space on the bench beside her. This time, she was taking no chances.

They both looked up as Robin was brought into the room, wearing a drab gray suit. Her hair had grown out, and long bangs partially obscured her face.

“All rise.”

Judge Kiernan entered through the door behind his bench, took his seat, and signaled to the clerk to proceed. The prosecutor spoke first, followed by Robin’s attorneys, and then finally the judge called out Sadie’s name.

She clutched the gray box like it was a lifeline, and stared over at Robin so hard that at first she didn’t hear the judge’s question.

“Ms. Donovan?”

“Right. Yes. I’m here to ask for an upward departure.” She’d been told the term by the prosecutor, which meant asking the court to consider granting a harsher sentence than normal. The phrase seemed more suited to first-class seating on an airline flight than a criminal’s punishment.

“Proceed.”

“While all the items were eventually recovered, I can’t help but think it’s important to send a message to other thieves out there who might be considering something similar.”

“The sentence is determined from the value of the items stolen. Are you saying that’s wrong?” asked the judge.

“The problem with that approach is that the value of a rare book is imperfect, fluctuating. These items have been held for years, centuries, and our perspective changes over time. For example, records of sales of slaves from the 1800s were considered extraneous items a hundred years ago. Today, they’re rare artifacts from a time that requires further examination, renewed study. Their value has gone up because society’s view of them, and the history they describe, has evolved.

“What Miss Larkin stole was not simply a certain number of pages worth a certain amount, but pieces of Western history and culture that have a dramatic impact on scholarly research. The loss of these items is a detriment to all humanity and civilization.”

She glanced over at Nick, who had a pained expression on his face. She might have overdone the hyperbole at the end there, but when she looked at the judge, he was leaning forward, listening.

“Continue, Ms. Donovan.”

“One solution would be to lock them away permanently, to keep people like Miss Larkin from stealing them. But we depend on the accessibility of these documents so that new ways of thinking can flourish. That means the library’s contents must be made available to the good people who seek them out and use them to advance knowledge and scholarship. As much as they need protection, we can’t hide them away.” She paused. “Can I show you something?”

The clerk motioned for Sadie to place the box on a table in front of the judge’s bench. Sadie pulled white gloves out of her purse and made a show of putting them on—Claude’s idea, and a smart one—before uncovering the box and lifting out the folio. She slowly opened it to the title page.

“I can’t see from here, hold on, I’m going to join you.” The judge was by her side a few moments later. Sadie pointed out the page that had been sliced out, how the book would never be the same, and that the title page was now at great risk, having been removed from its rightful place in the binding.

Next, she took out the Woolf diary, and opened it to the final entry. “This tear wasn’t here before it was taken. The pages are delicate, and can’t be handled roughly. In time, we may lose this entire section.”

The judge shook his head. “It’s the last thing that she ever wrote down, is it?”

“So we believe, yes.”

“Thank you for your information, Ms. Donovan.”

She had more to say, but went back to her seat. The court was recessed, and after lunch they gathered again. She’d been too nervous to eat anything.

The judge cleared his throat. “Section 5K2.0 of the legal code permits a departure whenever there exists an aggravating or mitigating circumstance not adequately taken into consideration by the Sentencing Commission in formulating the guidelines. The nonmonetary loss caused by Robin Larkin is such an aggravating factor. Hence, an upward departure is appropriate. Indeed, the case directly supports that conclusion.”

The courtroom erupted in cheers, but the clerk called them back to order as the judge continued. “Robin Larkin, you are sentenced to five years in prison, three years of probation, three hundred days of community service in an adult literacy program, and directed to pay full restitution to the New York Public Library.”

Nick hugged Sadie close. “Well done.”

“We did it.”

Robin hadn’t moved from her seat, but turned her head in their direction. Sadie expected her to grimace or glare at her, but she didn’t, not really. Instead, she looked beyond Sadie, a faraway look on her face.

Strange.

The court officers led her away, and once the judge had exited, people began milling out. Sadie turned around. Who had Robin been staring at?

In the very back row, tucked behind a scrum of reporters, sat an old man with a thick gray beard and round spectacles, like he was out of another time altogether. The rest of the room whirled around in her vision, only the man staying still, in the middle of the frame.

She gave the boxes to Nick and told him she’d meet him uptown. “Do not leave these behind in the cab, please.”

“Look who’s talking.” He kissed her goodbye. “I assure you they’ll get back safely. I’ll give them directly to Claude.”

After he’d left, she approached the old man, slowly, carefully, as if he might disappear into thin air.

“You came.” She studied his face. His skin was mottled, the lids of his eyes hanging low. Yet his profile matched hers; they shared the same nose and chin.

He looked up at her, his body trembling slightly. “You were quite good up there. To watch you was”—he paused—“remarkable.”

“Thank you, Uncle Harry.”

They stared at each other, unsure of what to say or do next. Sadie was both fascinated and terrified. She’d found him.

“You look just like my mother,” he said.

“That’s what my mother used to say as well. The few times she mentioned her.”

His voice cracked. “Our dear Pearl. Thank you for letting me know about her passing.” Sadie sat down next to him. For a moment nothing was said, and then he took her hand, the grip surprisingly strong. “I hope she went peacefully, in the end.”

“She did. I’m sorry you had to hear it that way, in a letter.”

Sadie had mailed the letter to a bookstore tucked deep in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, unsure if it was the right thing to do or not. She’d included her phone number, and every evening since, she’d eagerly checked her answering machine, to no avail. Over the past few days, she’d decided that if she didn’t hear back from him soon, she’d enlist Nick in driving up there with her, just show up in person. But that hadn’t been necessary.

“How did you know to look for me?” he asked.

Sadie described finding Laura’s hidden note, which implied that Harry was still alive at the time of his mother’s death. “According to Laura, you were the only other party involved who knew about the dumbwaiters. You had to be the link to Robin. I tried to locate a Harold Lyons, but it’s too common a name, I couldn’t track you down that way. And even if I could, turns out you’d changed it.”

“Right. To Merrill. When I left the city, I needed a fresh start.”

“The answer came to me when I requested the name of the bookstore where Robin had worked as a teenager. It stood out.”

Harry smiled. “Lion Books. I suppose I couldn’t help but hold on to a vestige of my lineage.”

“I sent that letter and hoped for the best, and here you are.”

To find Pearl’s long-lost brother so soon after losing Pearl broke Sadie’s heart. The joy that he was still alive was tempered by the decades that he’d kept away, by choice, which Sadie simply couldn’t comprehend. After everything his mother and sister had been through, why had he remained estranged? Sadie couldn’t imagine abandoning Lonnie, LuAnn, and Valentina.

“Why did you stay away for so long?” she asked, finally.

As the courtroom emptied, the old man spoke of gangs and stolen books, of a city vastly different from the one they were in now. “Initially, I was too afraid to return home, and by the time I realized I had to face what I had done, Red Paddy—the gang leader—threatened my family if I stopped stealing books for him. He was a charismatic, dangerous sort, who brought me under his wing and then told me lies to keep me under his control. I hated that it tore us all apart, that I couldn’t make amends for my actions, but I didn’t think I had a choice. The world is a large place when you’re just a child, and I didn’t have any perspective on what was true and what was not. I only saw danger, and couldn’t find my way out. After I learned my father had killed himself, there was no returning to my family. I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face. They were better off without me. There was no going back.”

Sadie watched, unsure of what to do or say, as he dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. “How did you eventually get out?” she finally asked.

“At some point a few years later, the police raided our hideout, and we scattered. I knew it might be my only opportunity, and so I hitched a ride out of town. The truck was going north, which was good enough for me, anywhere I couldn’t be found. Books were what I knew, so I got a job at a bookstore, working as an assistant, eventually taking over after the owner died.”

“And in all that time, you never thought to reach out?”

He shuddered. “No. I was too ashamed. I’d read about my mother’s budding literary career in London, and was happy for her. Once, when I was in New York years later for a booksellers’ conference, I looked up Pearl in the phone book and stood outside her town house. I saw her leave with you in tow. You both looked happy, safe. That was good enough for me. I couldn’t intrude. I figured Pearl hated me.

“I tried to make up for what I’d done by hiring at-risk teenagers to help out in the store. Most of them weren’t interested in the books, but Robin was different.” The quiet, devoted way he said her name suggested he had a soft spot for the girl. “She’d had a terrible childhood, and lost herself in reading from an early age. She said books had saved her sanity. One day she was sad, missing her sister, which made me miss my own, and I began to regale her with stories of living in a huge library, where we played baseball in the great rooms using books as bases until we got caught and yelled at, of secret elevators that took you to faraway places. Robin didn’t believe me, so I showed her an old article written about our family’s life that I’d unearthed at my local library.

“We connected, you see. Robin felt guilty at the fact that her younger sister was living in another city with another family, that they’d been split up, and I told her that I understood, having lost my sister as well. No doubt some of my residual bitterness seeped into our conversations, bitterness about being left behind when my mother and Pearl moved to England, bitterness that Pearl never tried to find me when she returned. Every evening as we closed up the shop, Robin would ask me for more stories, and somehow, in the retelling, my bitterness slowly faded away. I realized I also could have reached out, but had chosen not to.” He glanced over at the empty defense table. “One time I stupidly told Robin about the Tamerlane. I told her that it had never been recovered, and was probably now in the care of my sister, Pearl.”

Which had sent Robin on a mission to find her. Pearl had gone back to her maiden name after husband number two—Sadie remembered her saying something about how pleased her own mother would’ve been. With the information gleaned from the newspaper article, it would have been easy enough for Robin to look up Pearl Lyons’s address in the phone book, just as Harry had, and begin staking out the family.

“Robin was a good girl, early on,” said Harry. “Smart, hungry for knowledge. She was mad for Shakespeare, and I would read the sonnets out loud to her, just as my mother did for me.”

Sadie thought of the folio page. It had indeed been some kind of sentimental token. But Sadie felt no sympathy for the woman who’d put Valentina in danger. “Robin wasn’t forced to steal, she chose to do it.”

He remained silent, as if the storytelling had drained him of words. When he finally spoke, it was in a tearful whisper. “I can’t help but think that by telling the stories, I displaced my anguish onto Robin—who also felt forgotten—where it festered and grew into something terrible. We are both to be blamed. It should be me, not Robin, locked away.”

She sat for a moment, lost in her own grief. Finally, she put an arm around him. Strange how she was more willing to forgive her uncle than Robin, even though they both had done terrible things. Yet Harry had tried to atone for his actions by fostering a love of reading in customers and kids from tough circumstances, while Robin allowed reading to bring joy to her life, and then embarked on a crime spree that would take that love away from others. They’d made choices at every turn. No one was above reproach.

Harry’s face crumpled. “I blame myself, for all of this. For everything.”

“You were only a boy.” Sadie couldn’t believe she was comforting the library’s original book thief. But it was true. Unlike Robin, he’d been only a child.

“What a mess it all was.” He patted her hand. “But what a marvel you are. Tell me, how is your exhibit going?”

“Quite well.” In fact, she’d been named permanent curator just a few days ago, and after, she and Nick had celebrated with a night at the opera, lingering in front of the Lincoln Center fountain for a long, glorious kiss.

“I am sorry for this. I hate that these books were harmed. I’ve spent my life trying to make up for what I did back then. But it’s all been for naught.”

“No. This case was important. The judge made a stand, and because of that, any future book thieves will be held accountable. It took a while, but we’ve made a big difference.”

He nodded, still looking bereft.

The pent-up anger that Sadie had been holding in, ever since the first theft, finally began to dissipate as the secrets of generations of the Lyons family unspooled like typewriter ribbon.

“Uncle Harry, have you returned to the library since that day?”

He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Maybe it’s time. Since you’re in town, I’d love it if you would come by and visit the exhibit. I could give you a personal tour. I know my brother, Lonnie, and his wife and daughter would love to meet you as well.”

“Are you sure?” His voice shook with hope.

“Yes, I’m sure. You’re the connection that’s been missing all this time, the link I’ve been searching for between my mother and my grandmother. There’s so much I want to learn, if that’s all right. All the stories that I never knew. Will you share them with us, with me and Lonnie? Say, tomorrow at four?”

“I would, most certainly. It would be my honor. Tomorrow at four it is.”

She stood, reluctant to leave this man. Eager to find out more in the coming days.

Yet, no matter what, some questions would remain unanswered. What had it been like for Laura Lyons to leave her son behind, to move to another country and start a new life? Only a tiny sliver of what she’d experienced had been left behind in her note, the anguish and pain pulsing behind each word, behind each carefully chosen phrase. It was a crucial piece of literary history, recovered and now safely tucked away within the library’s walls. And a crucial piece of Sadie’s personal history, too. She was grateful that she was finally learning about her extraordinary grandmother, who had taken risks and pursued what she cared about, even when society didn’t approve. Sadie might not have quite as many obstacles, but she was proud to think that she’d overcome her fear, and was following in her grandmother’s footsteps.

Like Laura, Sadie was devoted to her work. And also like Laura, she’d met and fallen in love with someone who was as passionate about their career as she was. After all the uncertainty of the past several months, Sadie had finally set herself free. She was free to love the handsome, burly man who’d approached her in the Reading Room so many months ago, and free to continue as curator, protector, and champion of the Berg Collection. She checked her watch.

It was time to head uptown, back to the library, back home.