The Cartographers(84)

Maybe that was why none of us had tried very hard to seek him out on the days that he was with us in Agloe—we knew he needed his space and silence. Or maybe that was an excuse. Maybe each of us were so caught up in our little parts that we didn’t want to be distracted by the others’ troubles so clearly brewing around us, and so we left it until it was too late.

We hesitated, studying the door.

“Are you sure?” Eve asked. “It feels . . . wrong, somehow.”

I knew what she meant. I felt the same way.

But that was all the more reason to go in.

“If he’s got nothing to hide, then he’s got no reason to be angry,” I said. “We could even do our survey of his building now, when we won’t be interrupting him while he’s inside, trying to work,” I added, to seem more optimistic about Wally’s innocence than I felt.

Eve didn’t look convinced either, but she nodded.

Slowly, I eased the door open.

From the outside, the place had reminded me of a small-town library at first—but as I looked at what Wally had done with the interior, and the way the silence hung oppressively around us, the building didn’t really look like a library at all.

It looked more like a vault.

There, organized and labeled and catalogued on what had once been bare shelves, were copies of the same map Wally and Tam had found by accident, the very first day we came to Rockland.

Not just a handful, but hundreds of them. Thousands, even.

Thousands of maps of Agloe.

“Oh my God,” Eve finally said.

What had it cost him to do this? How much money? Or how many sins?

“We have to tell them,” I said. “How far this has gone. What he’s doing.”

“How did we miss this?” Eve asked. “How did we not see?”

“Maybe we would have, if we hadn’t been so caught up in us,” I replied.

Eve grimaced, ashamed.

My gut twisted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just as much to blame. More, even. I’m the one betraying someone.”

“No, you aren’t,” Eve said. “I’m just as guilty.” She took a breath and let it out shakily. “I’m trying, Francis. I really am.”

“Me too,” I sighed.

The silence lingered a moment too long.

“Let’s go get the others,” Eve said, looking away from me. “Before Wally comes back.”

“He’s been gone three days.” I shrugged. “It gets longer and longer every time.”

“Still,” she replied. “We’ve seen enough to share our concerns with everyone. Better sooner rather than later.”

What she said made sense. We did need to tell the others. But the knowledge that we were in a place that there was no urgent reason to leave was starting to become too hard to ignore.

“We should go,” Eve whispered again, the same way she had at the very beginning, the day our affair started.

“We should,” I said.

But neither of us moved, at first.

And then finally we did.

But it wasn’t toward the door. It was toward each other.

“We can’t keep doing this,” she said. Her face was buried in my neck. “This has to be the last time.”

“Yes,” I agreed, in between breaths as we kissed. “This is closure.”

“Closure,” she repeated. “For good.”

Really, it was selfish, but that’s the excuse we gave ourselves. The last time we’d cheated together, we hadn’t known it was the last time, that it would be too difficult to hide after that and so we’d simply have to cut it off without warning and hope it would stick. I told myself that was why it had been so hard—because we hadn’t known it was the end until it was already past us. That if we did it only once more, promising it was the last, it would work this time.

I had just ripped off Eve’s dress and pressed her to me, her skin hot against mine, when the door opened again.

We were doomed from the start. The question was never if, but when.

“Hurry,” I begged her as she raced to get dressed again, cursing, but her dress was tangled with her bra, the sleeves and straps all twisted up, and she couldn’t put it on without pulling them apart first. She scrambled frantically with the fabric, and I ran around the corner toward the door, to stall whoever was entering.

Please don’t let it be Romi, I prayed. Please let it be Daniel. He was my best friend and would never believe I could do what I was doing. He wouldn’t even know to suspect it. Maybe I could stall him long enough or convince him that he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing . . .

But it wasn’t either of them.

“Francis!”

I scrambled to a halt in front of Wally.

He gasped. “What are you doing here?” He looked like a puppy who’d been caught pooping on the rug, his eyes huge and terrified. He would have realized I probably looked the same, if he’d been any less surprised. “What’s wrong with your shirt?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, tugging on the hem, hoping I’d yanked my top more into place. “You said you were going to be on the road all day. How did you even get into Agloe by yourself?” Even through the haze of my adrenaline, I managed to notice what he was carrying. Car keys and papers, and another copy of our Agloe map. “Is that . . . ”