The Cartographers(18)
Because that was another thing Nell’s father had done. In addition to ruining her own career in the Junk Box Incident, he’d also ruined Felix’s—and their relationship.
She and Felix had met in grad school at UCLA. He’d asked her out by drawing a map leading to a restaurant he’d chosen. It was so unbelievably corny, but until then, Nell had never met anyone who loved cartography as much as she did, except her father and Swann. But Felix was better with computers than all of them. The data, the modeling, the algorithms. Her specialty was ancient maps, and Felix’s was contemporary. They were a perfect team—opposites in everything, from their backgrounds to their work to their personalities, but somehow it worked. After graduation, when the NYPL’s call for interns went out, she fought as hard to get him a spot as she had for herself, but she hadn’t needed to. His application stood out just as strongly as hers. It was a dream come true for them both, everything they’d ever wanted. Nell couldn’t wait to tell her father after they had published to critical acclaim that not only was Felix brilliant, but he was also in love with her, and she with him. That his maybe future son-in-law was also a cartographer. Their family was going to be insufferably cute.
But then the Junk Box Incident happened.
Felix had been sucked into the argument once it reached shouting levels, and defended her against her father like he thought a good boyfriend should. He’d dared to suggest that the great Dr. Young could be wrong about the contents of the box and offered to run the maps through electronic analysis for him—and brought down the man’s infamous wrath on himself as well. Nell’s father had demanded Irene Pérez Montilla fire Nell in one breath, and Felix in the next.
After that, there had been no point in telling him about her and Felix. Firstly, because Nell had vowed never to speak to Dr. Young again for what he’d done, and secondly, because Felix seemed to feel the same way about her. She came home from the library for the last time cradling the remains of her desk to find that all of Felix’s things were gone. There was a letter for her on the table in his handwriting. But there was no map inside that time—just an apology.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Felix said suddenly, startling her back to the present. “What is that doing here?”
Nell looked up to see him already in the living room, staring at the coffee table in shock. At the map upon it, back again like a bad ghost.
This was already going so well.
“I can explain,” she started, but he interrupted, furious.
“That is what you called me here for, after seven years? Is this a joke? Did you secretly keep it all this time?”
“No!” she insisted. “I’m as surprised as you. This is what I found in Dr. Young’s things.” She paused. “In his portfolio.”
Felix glared back at her. “The portfolio?” He clearly remembered the significance of the leather case as well. “Why would he keep something like this in there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “And I thought, since your focus was modern era and urban maps, maybe over the years since, you’d come across something that—”
He laughed. “I had been talking about the other maps in the box that day, Nell. The Franklin, the Calisteri. Actual maps—not this piece of crap! Maybe the years have been a little long for you at Classic, but map curation is a science, not—”
“Okay, that’s enough!” Nell snapped. “You come into my home after years of not speaking, and then start insulting me—”
“Are you serious? I didn’t just show up here, Nell! You asked me for a favor—even after everything that happened. I’m not the one who owes you anything. And here I still am,” he growled.
They squared off for a long moment, the air crackling, electric with anger.
There was a perverse comfort in the fact that they were already yelling at each other, still just as angry as the day they’d broken up. She’d been nervous that their meeting was going to go badly, but she’d been even more nervous that it might go well—she’d spent so many years desperately missing Felix, then so many more trying to forget him, she didn’t think she could have handled it if there had been a spark again after all this time.
Because there definitely had not been a spark when she’d first opened the door and seen him.
Right?
She pushed the thought roughly from her mind.
Felix finally sighed. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said, quieter this time.
Nell massaged her eyelids. “Are you going to help or not?”
In response, Felix threw up his hands, giving in. He took the map from the coffee table and moved back to the kitchen, where the light was better. She watched him study the unremarkable design, the plain colors and simple lines that wound their way across the state between dots whose names sounded like places from a movie, not real life. Sullivan, Ferndale, Howell, Cold Spring.
A few months after their banishment from the NYPL, Nell had heard Felix had gotten a job at the giant tech company Haberson Global, in their mapping division. Money enough to live on, and at a respectable company, for which she knew he was grateful, but not happy. It wasn’t cartography. It was data mining and navigation algorithms. The day she finally got an offer from Classic, she understood how he felt. But as had happened to Nell, no other museum or library would touch Felix after Dr. Young had declared them personae non gratae—even with Swann’s behind-the-scenes attempts to help.