I wanted to see the window again, to see if there was anything I’d missed. Keegan had already gone, however; the door to the vestment room was locked. I probably could have eased it open if I’d tried, but the eyes of all those rectors lined up along the wall made me too uncomfortable. I had a sense, also, that I should not trespass, which echoed the feeling I’d always had growing up that the mystery of this place was ultimately sealed against me, no matter how much I might long to enter. I was a girl, and so my picture would never look like the long line of men whose faces lined the wall and whose domain this seemed. Though in the Episcopal Church women were regularly ordained starting in 1976, Suzi was the first female priest I had ever met. Likewise, in my family, the stories never had women at the center, which was one reason why the discovery of Rose—an ancestor I’d never heard of before—felt so astonishing and intriguing.

I walked on. The sanctuary was very still, my footsteps echoing on the tiles. Near the front doors, at the end of the aisle, I paused and turned. Light filtered through the stained-glass windows, muted and serene. Each one told a story, invisible in darkness, taking life only when the sun rose and filled the colors, and each was the story also of the people who had given it, long dead now, whose names ran along the bottom in gold letters. In honor of James, Hannah, Our Beloved Mother, The Evans Family, Sarah, Virginia, child of Susan and Samuel. What had Joanna said in the office as she handed me these papers? It gives you chills . . . all these people . . . standing right where we are now . . . living out their lives. My father had grown up in this church, and his father. My great-grandfather Joseph had walked these aisles before anyone alive today was born.

And Rose. She had stood here, too, decades before the chapel on the depot land was built yet somehow connected to it, holding her infant daughter, trying to soothe her perhaps, tucking the edge of blanket closer against the coolness radiating from the stone walls, even in May. Then she had walked out into the world and disappeared.

A door fell shut; footsteps sounded on the choir stairs, and then the Reverend Suzi emerged into the sanctuary.

“Ah, Lucy,” she said, looking momentarily startled. “Still here? Can I help you with something?”

“I’m just leaving. I just wanted to stand in the church for a minute, I guess. I hope that’s okay. I was thinking about all the people who’ve stood here before me. I haven’t been here since my father died,” I added.

“Of course it’s okay. I heard about his accident,” she said. “I’m sorry. It must have been very hard.”

I nodded. “It was. But it was a long time ago.”

“Some moments resonate in powerful ways,” she said.

Our voices were soft amid the stone walls, the wood. I didn’t know what else to say, and anyway my throat had thickened with the memory. Suzi let the silence gather for a moment.

“You’re Evie Jarrett’s daughter, aren’t you?” she asked, finally. “How’s your mother doing? How’s her arm?”

“She’s fine,” I said. “Better than I could have imagined, actually; she’s even got a date this afternoon.”

Again, Suzi didn’t respond right away, which made me really have to think about the words I’d spoken, to hear the sharp edge my tone had carried.

“You know, your mother’s very glad you’re here,” she said. “I went to see her after the accident and she was so excited that you might come. It must be a little strange for you, though. Are things very different?”

“Oh, very! Everything has changed so much. Even here. Maybe especially here. It wasn’t that long ago, but I was the first girl allowed to be an acolyte in this church.”

“Really? So you were breaking new ground.” Suzi spoke rather pensively, which made me wonder about the path she’d taken.

“I suppose I was. I didn’t think about it that way, though. I just wanted to be an acolyte. I hate to say it, looking back, but it didn’t cross my mind even then that women could be priests.”

“Some changes take a very long time. Like water on stone. That’s why I’m so especially interested in these windows.” She nodded at the manila folder Joanna had given me. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes, actually. I did.” The photocopies of the baptismal certificate and the window receipt were still faintly warm from the machine when I handed them to her. “Rose. Her name was Rose Jarrett. She would have been my great-great-aunt, though I’ve never heard of her before. She had a daughter, Iris.”

“Reverend David Prescott—he’s in one of the photos on the wall,” she noted, pointing out the signature. “Such a long time ago. No one would remember her, which is too bad. Whoever she was, she seems to have found a way to see herself—and women in general—in the sacred texts. To imagine herself into the story, so to speak. I think that must have been exceptionally difficult at the time.”

“I know. I wonder what happened to her. And to Iris, too. Plus there’s the border pattern, which is so fascinating. Keegan said the windows dated to the 1930s, but the papers I have are much earlier.”

“Keegan, yes.” She nodded, smiling, as she gave me back the photocopies. “Well, he would know, wouldn’t he? I’ve become very fond of Keegan, working with him on these windows. He has enormous expertise, and he’s been good enough to donate his time, which is a real blessing. The windows are a treasure, but they turn out to be so incredibly expensive to maintain.”

“It’s been good to see him again,” I said, remembering Keegan lifting Max into the air, their jokes back and forth, their laughter. I thought about Blake and Avery with a baby on the way, the elegant vase of gladioli sent to my mother by a stranger, the mysterious old papers, fragile and gritty to the touch.

Her cell phone rang, shattering the quiet, and the Reverend Suzi slipped it from her pocket, glancing at the number.

“Sorry—I have to take this,” she said, gesturing toward the door. “It’s good to meet you, Lucy. Come by anytime. And keep me posted on whatever you find, okay?”

Outside the muted sanctuary, the world seemed bright, newly washed and vibrant. Summer traffic was already backing up the hill and the sidewalks were crowded with tourists in their loose bright cotton clothes. I walked without intention for a while, absorbed by my discoveries, wandering through shops without really seeing what I was looking at. In the park I wove my way through the art fair to the seawall and tried to call Keegan; he didn’t pick up, so I left a message about the baptismal certificate as I wandered on through the village. At last I found myself at the pier where Blake moored his boat. The Fearful Symmetry was graceful, thirty feet long with a tall white mast, bobbing gently on the water. I stepped down onto the deck and called his name, but the voice that floated up from the cabin was Avery’s, light and questioning. She appeared at the bottom of the stairs wearing jeans and a gauzy yellow blouse, her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Hi there. Blake’s at work. I was just going over some papers. Come on down, if you want.”

The stairs were narrow, opening into a paneled room as compact and complete as a studio apartment, with a v-berth in the bow, a galley kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a sitting area. I’d always marveled at how sparely furnished Blake’s life was. He didn’t care much for things; he liked the uncluttered feeling that came from owning very little. Avery moved some pillows to make room on the built-in sofa. The table was covered with drawings, and I recognized my mother’s drafting paper, her neat lines and handwriting.

“Want some iced tea?”

“I’d love some, thanks,” I said.

Avery moved as deftly in the narrow galley as she did in her restaurant. She piled up all the papers on the table and placed tall glasses of tea, with sprigs of fresh mint, on two bright yellow coasters she pulled from a drawer. I had to smile: never in a million years would it have crossed Blake’s mind to buy coasters. “Those are some sketches your mom did,” she said as she sat down. “They’re plans for organic vegetable gardens, actually. That’s my dream someday—to have organic gardens to supply the restaurant. I hate paying to ship all that stuff, using all that energy just to move produce around. She drew these up for me for my birthday last month. It was really nice of her.”

I sipped my tea: cold, faintly raspberry. I remembered Avery from high school as quiet, so shy she’d hardly spoken the few times we’d met before. But that was years ago, before she’d gone away to school, before she and Blake had ended their romance and started it again several times. She seemed so different now, confident and sure of what she wanted. She was at least two years younger than I, and yet she already had her own business and a baby on the way. I felt a pang of unexpected envy. Envy, and the feeling I’d had so often in Japan that despite my wild adventures, I’d really been circling around the same still point for years.

“I think you’re brave,” I said.

“What? Dating Blake?”

“Well, that, of course.” I laughed. “No—taking all this on, I mean.”

“I’m nuts, actually.” She laughed, too, relaxing back on the cushions. “Really nuts, I sometimes think. It’s exciting, sure, but there’s so much pressure. And it never ends. Still, I love working with food. I love it when the place is full and I look out and see everyone happy, eating healthy things.”

“My meal was so good.”

She grew serious. “Thanks, but it could have been better. If I had everything fresh, it would have been tons better. Your artichokes were canned, I don’t like that. We were hoping—Blake and I were hoping—that maybe we could get some acreage when the depot land is sold. Or else down the road, when your mother sells her place.”

I caught my breath a little to hear how far my mother’s plans had traveled, trying to sort out my complex feelings before I spoke. Loss, of course, and anger that I hadn’t known, and the feeling that I’d been left out, which wasn’t fair; I’d been gone for years, after all. Avery didn’t notice and went on speaking.

“Not the lake lots, of course. Too pricey. But that land is black earth, as rich as Iowa soil, and it used to all be farms, before all the bunkers and airstrips. There’s a black walnut tree just inside the depot gates—my great-grandfather planted that tree decades ago when that part of the land belonged to him. I’d like to get it back.”

There was wistfulness in her voice, and hard determination, too, and I thought about the day I’d arrived—was it only two days ago?—Pete leaning into the truck and saying, You sure you don’t have a dog in this fight, Blake?

“Were you at the rally?” I asked.

She shook her head and gave a short laugh. “It seems I’m only ever at the restaurant anymore. But I heard about it—people came in for lunch after it was over. Were you?”

“I saw it, that’s all. Driving by with Blake the day I arrived.” The boat swayed gently with a wave; one of my mother’s drawings slipped from the table and I leaned over to pick it up. “So many people were there.”

“So many—it’s true. It’s a huge controversy. The wetlands people may be getting together with the white deer people, though. They had lunch together, anyway—eggplant soufflés and white wine.”

I thought of the deer emerging from the trees and moving like clouds against the sea of tall grass. My father used to tell us stories about them, growing up, and sometimes we’d go out in the evenings to search for them, driving slowly on the gravel roads around the depot. People came to school with stories of having glimpsed one standing in the road or disappearing into the trees, but that was rare, and in all our searching, we’d never seen one. I asked Avery if she had.

“Just once. A long time ago. We were on our way home early one morning when one leaped in front of our car. My father slammed on the brakes, barely missed it. We watched it disappear into the trees, and then five or six others followed, pure white. I was little, so they seemed magical, like unicorns or something. I remember we all just sat there, not speaking, for a long time. Even my dad.”

I sipped my tea and studied the three framed photos on the wall behind Avery. The first had been taken on the deck, Blake standing behind Avery with his arms around her waist. Her head was tipped back against his shoulder, she was laughing, and he was smiling down at her, the wind sweeping a piece of her hair across his cheek. The other two were more formal, the two of them standing side by side, smiling at the camera in front of a lighthouse, an anchor.

“Do you like those?” Avery asked, turning to look. “I just had them framed last week. Those two on the left are from the trip we took to Nova Scotia last spring.”

“You look so happy, both of you.” I was hoping she would tell me about the baby, so I could stop pretending that I didn’t know.

“We were. It was a good trip, mostly.” She paused, as if choosing her words. “Lucy, is Blake very much like your dad was?”

I thought about this. I never would have said so before, but knowing that Blake was working at Dream Master made me reconsider. He’d given me his reasons, and they made sense, but all the same I wondered if the lure of the past had something to do with it; he could have worked anywhere else in town. “I don’t know. In little ways, maybe. The same laugh, the same eyes, that sort of thing. But I can’t really say. Why?”

Avery sighed. “I guess I’m just trying to figure him out. Sometimes he just seems so far away. So lonely, somehow.”

I didn’t answer right away. A very sad and lonely person—those were Yoshi’s words to me. I liked to think that the past had no power over me, but maybe I was caught in it, too. Avery half-stood and reached to the counter for a bag of pistachios, and I glimpsed the faint swell of her stomach beneath the gauzy blouse, so slight I might not have noted it unless I already knew. When Blake had visited me in Indonesia, he and Avery had broken up, and one evening he’d struck up a deep flirtation with a woman at the next table. I wouldn’t have guessed then that he’d be here now, back with Avery, about to have a baby. The boat swayed gently, making little ripples in the iced tea, and I thought of the waves that had run through the earth, and of Yoshi’s hand running the length of my thigh as I woke amid the earthquakes. I thought of his kindness, and his kiss on the train platform, which seemed a very long time ago.

“Lucy?” Avery said, offering me the pistachios. “Earth to Lucy? Did you want some of these? Some more tea?”

“No, thanks.” I smiled. “Sorry to be so spacey. I guess I’m still a little jet-lagged. I should probably get going, actually.”

“Well, it’s good to see you. Can I give Blake a message?”

I shook my head, imagining the sort of message I could leave: Discovered lost ancestor, please call ASAP. “That’s okay. I’ll track him down eventually.”

Upstairs, I lingered on the deck, thinking about Yoshi, about loneliness, mine and Blake’s and maybe everyone’s. It was still a clear day, but low clouds were scattered on the horizon and the wind had come up; the lake was decorated now with whitecapped waves. The fire siren sounded; it was noon. Even though I didn’t want to go to Dream Master, I did want to tell Blake what I’d discovered, and so I left the pier and crossed the main road, following the outlet away from the center of town.

For all his talk of progress, Art had let Dream Master go quite a bit. The plate-glass windows were filmy, and one of the gutters on the third floor was hanging askew. The brick needed tuckpointing, too, and the grass in front was long. It struck me that maybe Art’s hiring of Blake was less an act of generosity than it was of desperation. There was something weirdly comforting about that thought—there seemed to be some sort of balance in the universe as long as Art was doing poorly—except that now Blake was involved. I took a deep breath, cut across the gravel parking lot, and climbed the concrete steps. A little bell rang when I opened the door, just as it had in my childhood. I paused on the threshold, taking in the scents of metal and paint and sawdust, the underlying odor of dust.

Aisles of locks and hardware and tools—hammers and saws, planes and screwdrivers—ran the length of the store. There were bins of nails in addition to the prepackaged kinds. Wooden rulers and yardsticks sat beside tape measures in their flashy yellow cases. Dozens of different light fixtures hung from the ceiling.

I took a step and called out, “Hello.” Nothing. “Hello?” I called again, louder, but no one came.

I walked up and down the aisles, noting the little changes. Art had put gray speckled linoleum down over the planked floor I remembered; he’d taken down the old flypaper strips, probably long ago. The offices were still there, though, off a corridor that ran behind the storefront, still paneled in dark wood. My father’s, at the end of the hall, was completely changed—the rolltop desk gone, the windows shaded with plastic blinds, and a new conference table set up in the middle of the room, shiny black laminate, with sleek black chairs around it. A nondescript gray carpet covered the floor. I looked hard for the room where I’d played with Blake and Joey, the room where my father had unlocked so many secrets, but I found no trace.

“Lucy?”

I hadn’t heard Art coming, and I started. Tall and broad-shouldered, he blocked much of the hall. Again, he looked so much like my father that I found it difficult to speak.

“I was looking for Blake,” I said.

“I sent him to take an order in Union Springs. He should be back pretty soon.”

“Oh. I see.” There was an awkward silence. “Do you have a minute, then?” I asked. I realized I hadn’t really spoken to Art in years—even at my father’s funeral we’d exchanged only the most formal of condolences—but maybe my mother was right and he’d be able to shed some light on the discoveries I’d made.

He glanced at his watch. “A few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to meet with the zoning office. But come on in, why don’t you, and sit down.”

I sat in a leather chair with wooden arms. It would spin, I remembered; we used to play on it when we were kids.

“So, Lucy,” Art said. “It’s been a while. What’s on your mind?”

“It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Well, I guess I just had some questions.”

He put his elbows on the desk, made a tent with his fingers, and nodded.

“Happy to help if I can,” he said.

I was still carrying the papers from the church. Rose Jarrett would have been Art’s great-aunt; Iris would have been some kind of cousin. Yet I found myself reluctant to mention Rose, the discovery of her existence still too new for me to want to share it. Instead, I explained about the papers and pamphlets I’d found in the cupola and asked if he knew anything about them.

Art listened closely. “In the cupola, you say? What sort of papers?”

“Oh, a hodgepodge, really. Old newspaper articles, some magazines. I was interested in them because they looked like they had to do with the women’s suffrage movement. I thought they might be historical. I thought you might know.”

His lower lip jutted out slightly as he thought, and he shook his head. “Doesn’t sound at all familiar. Before my time, of course.”

“Right. I thought they might have belonged to my greatgrandmother—your grandmother. Cora, wasn’t that her name? The dates seem about right for that. I never knew her, of course. I don’t even remember hearing stories about her.”

I’d found the key; he relaxed back into his chair.

“My grandmother was a lovely person. At least as much as I remember her. I was only about ten when she died. She loved children, doted on us. She made beautiful pies, too; it seemed there was always a fresh one on her kitchen counter. That was in the house you lived in, which was where I grew up, too. We moved in after our grandfather died; Grandma Cora was a widow by then and not in good health. She slept in the big room at the front of the house—I think you’ve got the piano where her bed used to be—and my mother took care of her until she died. Now, my mother—your grandmother—she was a wonderful woman, too.”

I nodded, remembering the story my mother had told me about what had happened while my father was in Vietnam. My grandmother had died when I was seven, and all I could conjure of her was a fluttering sleeve of a polyester print dress, her eyebrows arching as she laughed, and the fleeting dark red color of her fingernails.

“She didn’t like to swim,” I remembered, suddenly.

“No, she did not. She made sure we learned, though, me and Marty.”

“You know, the strange thing is, there was a note with these articles. It seemed like it had been written by a member of the family—it was written to your grandfather, in fact—but it wasn’t signed. It was passionate, though. A note about a girl named Iris, being sent away.”

He didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke, it was slowly.

“Well, I suppose it’s no secret that every family has its skeletons; you know that by now. There was some sort of scandal, way back when. My grandmother’s sister, maybe? I’m just talking from what I’ve gleaned, growing up, overhearing a bit of this or that. It’s probably as much conjecture as truth. But something did happen that got hushed up. Had to be hushed up, that’s how I understood it, for the sake of the family. It never interested me much, to be honest. I’m much more concerned with the here and now, with what’s right in front of my face.”

I thought about what was right in front of us, this building with its layers of the past, and all the things that had gone unspoken for so many years.

“What happened?” I asked, the words slipping out despite my best intentions. “What happened between you and my father?”

When Art finally met my eyes his face was anguished, grief welling up, the creases on the side of his mouth deepened, his eyes darkened with pain.

“I will not speak ill of the dead,” he said. “That is one thing I will not do. But I’m sure you’ve heard only one side of the story. Your father was a good man, but he wasn’t easy. He especially wasn’t easy for me. Maybe I wasn’t easy for him, either. I don’t think we’d have gone into business together if it hadn’t been expected of us from the time we were born. Still. What I did back then, while he was off fighting the war—it was wrong. I can’t undo it. But I can make a place here for you and for Blake. I was—I am—absolutely serious about that.”

I didn’t know what to say; his impassioned remorse caught me off guard. I wanted both to defend my father—against what, I didn’t quite know—and to comfort my uncle, who seemed consumed by the past in ways I hadn’t ever considered. My emotions were so intense and so conflicting I didn’t realize right away that he hadn’t really answered my question, not at all.

“I can’t work here,” is what I finally said. “If that’s what you mean. I appreciate the offer, I suppose.”

He nodded once, ran his hand through his bristly gray hair.

“Just think about it, Lucy. There’s always a place for you here. Remember that.”

I told him I would and then I stood up, saying good-bye, touching the papers I’d found, just to be sure they were still in my bag.

“Don’t be a stranger, Lucy,” Art called as I left, and I waved.

A few customers had entered the store and were browsing in the aisles. To my surprise, Blake was behind the counter, listening intently to a woman describing the kind of plumbing supplies she needed. When he finished filling her order he came over, smiling, rolling his eyes a little at the situation. I thought of Yoshi, who had been so pleased when I told him about Blake’s impending parenthood. When we’d talked of children it had always been in an abstract sort of way, and now I found myself wondering what Yoshi would be like as a father.

“What’s up?” Blake asked.

“Yoshi says hello,” I said. “He’s going to try to smuggle in some rambutans.”

Blake laughed, and I told him briefly about the letters in the cupola and the windows in Keegan’s studio and the church. Again, I didn’t mention Rose. Blake was interested but distracted, too; he kept glancing around the store to see if there were any customers in need of help. Then Zoe came in, ringing the little bells on the door, and when she saw me she ran over and hugged me with the exuberance of early adolescence, then started talking a mile a minute about a play she was in. She’d grown so tall since I’d last seen her, and wore dangling earrings, and once in a while she spoke of herself in the third person—“Zoe is so excited!”—as if she were posting on Facebook and not talking to me in person. She looked a lot like Joey, with the same intense Jarrett eyes, her dark hair. Blake smiled, raised his eyebrows slightly, and drifted off.

I promised Zoe I would see her again before I left and she said she was coming to the solstice party with her parents. Then I left Dream Master and walked back into town, got a sandwich and drink from the grocery store, and sat on a bench by the outlet while I ate. Light made dancing patterns on the water and a few seagulls hovered on the concrete seawall, waiting for crumbs. I tossed them little pieces of bread, thinking about my discoveries at the church and my conversation with Art.

When I finished eating, I wadded up my lunch papers and tossed them out, pausing in the shade of an oak tree to look at the pictures I’d taken of the Wisdom window on my phone. The resolution wasn’t very good, but still the imagery was vibrant, striking. Had Rose designed them? And who had she been?

Yoshi had sent several messages regarding his flights. I didn’t call because it would be after midnight there by now, but I went to my saved messages and played the two he had left, telling me about a job he’d heard about, one I might like, and that my students missed me and he did, too. I closed my eyes and played them again, listening to the cadence of his voice.

Keegan had left a voice message, too, about the windows in the chapel. I tried to call him back, but he didn’t pick up.

When a break came in the traffic, I darted across the street and slipped into the library, which had once been a private home. Built of gray stone, it had a deep front porch facing the lake and a wooden screen door that creaked and slammed shut behind me, causing the librarian, a young man with short hair, to glance up. I passed the bulletin board thick with flyers: lost cats, town meetings, a poster from the white deer consortium, an open meeting of the Iroquois coalition. I sat at one of the long cherry tables where I used to do homework. Now there were computers at every seat. I typed in “Frank Westrum.” To my surprise, several articles appeared. Though I couldn’t trust them all, I read the first entry with some excitement anyway. Westrum had existed, clearly, and as more than a local artist who’d faded obscurely away.

At the end of the article there was a link to the Frank Westrum House in Rochester. A photo came up of a stained-glass window, a simple sphere in shades of ivory against a dark square background. A long-stemmed tulip followed the inner curve of the sphere, the leaves fluid, as if floating, the single red flower blooming. The patterns did not match the border pattern on the windows in Keegan’s studio or the church, but stylistically the resemblance was clear. Below was a single paragraph.

I read this over twice, thinking of the window with its cascades of vines, its animals and swimming fish, its brilliant colors, and its row of familiar lacy moons along the bottom. Rochester was about an hour away; I’d have time to get there. Sunlight filtered through the leaves, making an ever-changing pattern on the glossy table. The librarian gave me an amused, perplexed smile when I asked him what day it was, just to be sure.

“Wednesday, last time I checked.”

So much for making it that afternoon. And anyway, there was my mother’s party.

On an impulse, I went back and typed in “Beatrice Mansfield.” Sometimes I hated the Internet, which made it possible to give in to every momentary distraction or flight of mind. But to my surprise she, too, was listed with a brief entry.

Nothing came up when I typed “Rose Jarrett,” however; not a single thing. When I checked the library’s online catalog—the card catalog of my childhood, with its oak cabinet and thick rectangular cards in neat rows, was long gone—there was nothing there about her, either.

I sat back in the chair for a few minutes. The ceiling fan clicked softly above me, stirring the warm air. An older couple, probably retired, sat in stuffed armchairs by the bay window, reading magazines and looking up to chat with each other now and then. A group of teenage girls drifted in, moving together like a flock of beautiful birds. It was so calm and tranquil here, and I considered just staying for the afternoon, finding a good book and a comfortable chair. Those were some of the simple pleasures I’d imagined when I decided to make this visit. Yet the past kept welling up, as persistent as a spring, and my curiosity to know what had become of Rose and her daughter, and how their lives might have helped to shape my own, now became as insistent as hunger. It was partly the pure mystery of it, a desire to put all the pieces into place and solve the puzzle. Yet it had to do with my own life, too, all the scattered fragments that might come into focus if I had a clearer lens. All these years I’d taken such comfort in my wandering life, but really I’d been as anchored to the night my father died as Blake had been, circling it from afar, still caught within its gravity. Now Blake was moving on, and my mother was, too; the feeling I’d been fighting all day, this feeling of being adrift by myself in a vast dark space, engulfed me for a moment.

I closed my eyes, listening to the fan and the squeak of the screen door as it opened and fell shut with a sharp slam, the soft, excited voices of the girls, the rustling pages of the paper. The air smelled of new leaves, leather, and wood and bloomed with quiet. I stayed, finally. I stood up and crossed the room to the librarian, who looked up, smiling, as I started to talk, telling him the story.