The Cartographers(122)

Wally didn’t bother to look at him. “I just had to find a way back in, to find you again, and the atlas could be complete. And now it can. You and I, Tam. The town can be ours.”

“Oh, Wally,” Tamara said. She shook her head. “It was never supposed to be ours. That’s why I stayed. To stop that from happening. To stop you from going too far.”

“Too far?” he asked. “This is just the beginning.”

“No,” Tamara said. “No more.”

Wally stared at her, not understanding—or refusing to.

“You have to let it go.”

Finally, Wally smiled. Nell could see in his eyes that he never would. Maybe his original goal, all those years ago, had been only to prove that Tamara hadn’t died in the fire after all. To prove that he wasn’t guilty of killing the person he loved most in the entire world. But the grief had festered, the years had corrupted.

For so long, the map and Tamara had been the same thing—he had believed that if he could have one, it would be the same as having the other. He had spent so long seeking the map, he had lost sight of the fact that it was simply a means to an end. It had become the end for him.

“You just have to trust me,” Wally said. “You always trusted me before.”

Even now, when faced with Tamara herself, Wally had become too obsessed with the thing he’d been hunting his entire life. It was more real to him than the person. He would choose the map over everything else.

“Give it to me, Tam.”

Nell and Felix both froze—all Nell could think about was Swann, how he had tried to do something heroic with her copy of the map and she had lost him for it, how she had to prevent that from happening again—but Tamara’s hands didn’t move. Instead, she looked at Nell.

“I want her to do it,” she said. “I want her to see.”

Wally studied her for a long moment, then finally nodded. “Carefully,” he allowed.

Nell wiped her eyes and dried her hands on her clothes, and Tamara held out the bundle that she’d been carrying. It was wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with twine, but the shape and size were unmistakable.

It could be only one thing.

“Now,” Wally said to her, spellbound.

“Don’t do it,” Felix urged. He looked poised, ready to spring on Wally, even as Nell frantically shook her head. “Just run. Use it to get away.”

“No,” she insisted. “We’re not leaving without you.”

She was not going to live her life the way that her parents had. She was not going to choose the map over Felix or her family.

With trembling hands, Nell untied the twine, and the map unfolded.

She could not help but gasp.

It was beautiful. Breathtaking. An entirely hand-drafted, hand-colored, hand-pressed custom map of Agloe created by a single cartographer—her mother.

Nell studied it, spellbound by the artistry. She found the ice cream shop, and the park, with every tree and bush and blade of grass. The central square and the road into Agloe that connected to Main Street. The boats in the river, the printing factory. Even the welcome sign. Every single corner and building that existed in a town that couldn’t exist was there. All of it perfectly, lovingly rendered, down to the smallest detail.

This was her mother’s half of the Dreamer’s Atlas. The precious thing she had given up her family and her friends to stay behind to create. She had hidden herself and her work here, in the one place she knew Wally would not be able to reach her.

In the bottom corner, the symbol of the Cartographers echoed in simple dark ink. An eight-armed compass rose, with the letter C in the center.

Nell touched the little shape on the page.

This was what Wally had been after, all this time.

The true last copy of the Agloe Map.

“What’s that?” Wally asked sharply, suspicion flaring in his voice.

“The map,” Tamara replied, but Wally wasn’t looking at her masterpiece anymore. He was looking at Tamara’s hands, Nell realized. At the wrapping she’d taken from Nell so Nell could hold the map open. There was something else inside her mother was trying to keep hidden there, she could see now, tucked within the wrinkled layers—another small bundle of paper, plain white and folded into thirds in a stack.

“It’s a letter,” Wally murmured, with wonder. His free hand drifted up, as if pulled by invisible strings out of his control. He reached for it. “You wrote a letter.”

But Tamara took a step back. She pulled the paper slowly closer to her chest.

He stared at her, as if not understanding what she was doing.

Then, his eyes drifted to Nell. The coldness inside them made her shudder.

Tamara had been trapped in Agloe for decades, lonely and waiting, and when Wally finally managed to reach her again, she had a letter for her daughter, but nothing for him, even after all this time.

“Wally,” Tamara started, but he shook his head.

“No,” he said. The words came out of his mouth as though they tasted awful, like poison. “Don’t you destroy it. Thirty years you saved those words. It would be a shame to waste them now.”

“It’s just a letter,” Felix tried, hoping to draw Wally’s attention, but he didn’t move.

“Just a letter,” he repeated softly.