“Or not,” I whispered, sitting taller. Wondering was as useless as my search had been, and I had somewhere to be. I checked the time again and clicked print.
I was almost ten minutes late when I snatched the pages from the printer on my way to the reading room. Sadie was already tucked sideways into one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, a giant book propped up on her knees. I took a moment to figure out an answer for when she asked what I’d been looking into, and she’d inevitably ask, but even after I’d thought of three different lies to tell, I found myself still reluctant to take my leather chair and face her.
So far, she’d mostly acted like our little parting hadn’t happened, but I knew she could at any point decide we needed to talk things out—my worst nightmare. As if in the history of humanity anything has ever been truly accomplished by talking.
I folded the pages into my bag and grabbed a wayward book from a table. Then I wandered toward my chair, plopped down, and pretended to be deeply interested in whatever book it was. I couldn’t seem to read past the first sentence of the page I’d opened at random.
“Found God, have you?”
I glanced up at the top of the page and held in a reflexive sigh. Of all the books in this blasted place, I’d managed to pick up the least likely I’d ever, ever read: the Bhagavad Gita. It wasn’t even about God, though I didn’t feel the need to correct Sadie. I grunted and shrugged, forcing myself to look at every word of a paragraph farther down the page, though I probably couldn’t have repeated any of them had my life depended on it.
After a few moments of silence I traded the Hindu text for my trigonometry book and a pencil, but Sadie never did let me study for too long.
“Did you know there are fifteen miles of books in the London Library?”
“Yes, Sadie.”
“Some dating back to the fifteen hundreds?”
She had, of course, used these very facts in an attempt to entice me on my first visit to the place long ago, but I refused to look up and nodded before saying, “Yes, Sadie.”
“Over a million books—”
“You should, perhaps, busy yourself reading, or you’ll never get through them all.”
“Ha. Ha.” She paused, just long enough to make me think our little chat was over, and then said, “I would, but they add eight thousand books a year, you see.”
I offered her my most weary expression just as she threw her head back to stare up at the stacks of old leather bindings behind our chairs. It really was a sight to see. I’d bet all the gold in the palace that no one had disturbed any of the books in decades. I had no idea what that section was even supposed to be. Probably the biographies of the forgotten.
Sadie, of course, took a different view. “Heaven, Mori. When I die, this place will be transported right up into the clouds, so I can flit about the stacks for hours on end, reading into eternity.”
“You’ll run out of books,” I mumbled, three lines into a trigonometry problem that had stumped me in class. Now it seemed so obvious.
Sadie gasped. “You take that back, Moriarty. Like you mean it.”
“Eternity is a long time.”
“You think there’ll be no writers in Heaven to make me new books?”
I grinned without taking my eyes off my text. “None of the good ones.”
Sadie’s laugh tinkled quietly. “Dammit, Mori. Right’s right, but you don’t have to dash a girl’s eternal dreams.”
I finally joined in her laughter—a disarming laugh as it turned out, because she didn’t wait for me to stop before asking, “Do you forgive me?”
“I have to study.”
“Course you do.” I managed to almost finish the problem before she said, “But how can you concentrate with all this tension between us?”
I could have concentrated just fine before she mentioned the tension. She stared at me, which made me look away, at the walls, the floors, the staircases and stenciled signs. I’d never bothered to look around before, and now I could only seem to notice the inconsistencies. Perhaps someone more bohemian might have found the arbitrary nature of the decor to be homey. I found it—mismatched.
When I thought about it, Sadie and I were a bit like the London Library, really. Mismatched. Ancient wooden panels covering an entry wall, modern glass surrounding the stair. An ornate wooden banister to one floor, and a sleek, minimalist metal sweeping down to another. The whole building was made from a bunch of old residences, cobbled together in a way that would never have made sense to its original members but felt like home to Sadie.