The envelope was already on the floor when Ellis Marsh unlocked her apartment door. Cream paper, no postage, no return address. Her name in brown ink — the kind that fades from the inside out, the way real ink does. She set her tote on the hallway bench, shut the door behind her, and stood in the dark holding it for a long moment before reaching for the lamp.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, and pinned to the sheet with a straight pin was a page torn from a book. She recognised the edge — the soft, irregular deckle of a Victorian first edition — before she recognised the words. And he ran his fingers along the back of my neck, as if to see whether I was warm. Wuthering Heights. A first she had catalogued herself two autumns ago, for the Elmwood Rare Books Room. The copy was supposed to be behind glass in a locked case forty minutes' walk from where she was standing.
The sheet of paper underneath was not a letter. It was not long enough to be a letter. It was a time — 10:00 p.m., the coming Thursday — an address on Elm Street, and two words in the same brown ink, in the same hand.
You'll understand.
Ellis laid the page on the kitchen table and turned on the overhead light, because some part of her wanted witnesses. The fluorescent buzzed. Her cat Margaret walked across the envelope without ceremony and sat down on it, tail curled neatly around her feet, as if anchoring the thing to the surface of the table so it couldn't float away. Ellis watched her for a while. Then she went and put the kettle on, because that was what one did, and she did not know yet what else there was to do.
She had been a librarian for sixteen years. She had catalogued three estates' worth of Brontë first editions, a Dickens gift copy that smelled faintly of smoke, and a Shelley whose binding flaked in her lap. She had signed non-disclosure agreements for private collectors and held pages the colour of weak tea in her bare hands, reading the marginal notes of other readers across the gulf of a century. She knew how to recognise a forgery. She knew the difference between a copy and an impression.
And she knew, with the same quiet certainty with which she knew her own birthday, that the page pinned to the sheet on her kitchen table had come out of a book somebody was not supposed to be able to open.
She made the tea. She sat down. She did not look at the address again until the kettle clicked off.
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