Page 84 of Finders Keepers
The King of Edlo could not leave his heart here, as he will not be returning this time. The truth is that the Queen and the Princess made up the entirety of it anyway.
I lived a life that was more wonderful than I ever could have dreamed. Some of it was luck, yes. Some of it was intelligence and business savvy.
But most of it, Louisa, was you.
I remain yours, in death as I was in life,
J. J.
Quentin and I sit there, contemplating the letter for a solid minute.
“So, Fountain’s treasure is the love he found along the way?” he asks, breaking the silence.
“That certainly does seem to be the implication, yes.”
“That’s…beautiful,” Quentin says. Then snorts—a laughfiled underWhen he inadvertently skipped Question 4 on a standardized test and saw that his grade was a 33 percent because all of his answers were one place off.“And worth less than nothing on the free market.”
“Probably.” I can’t quite tell how I feel. There’s the pride of accomplishing what we set out to do, the disappointment that it was relatively anticlimactic, the finality of it all. And there’s also the joy that Fountain, Louisa Worman, and Isolde had each other, even if Fountain only truly appreciated the role Louisa played in his life toward the end of it. Followed by intense sadness that it seems like Louisa never found this. Maybe never even looked for it, considering how dismissive she was in the newspaper article about the treasure.
“Do you think she knew that he loved her?” Quentin asks, as if reading my mind. He holds out his hand, wordlessly requesting a look at the letter.
“I don’t know,” I say, handing him the two pieces of paper. I’m not sure how she would have felt about it anyway. Her long-term employer declaring his love for her? At least he did it after his death, so she wouldn’t have needed to respond if she didn’t return the sentiment. Then again, based on everything I know about Fountain and Louisa Worman, they were very close. They practically raised a child together. There had to besomewarm feeling there, even if it was only the kind born of shared experience.
“Nina,” Quentin says. “Look. There’s more on the back of the second page.” He’s turned it over, and there’s more handwriting there that I missed, thinking the shadows of the words were simply the first page beneath it showing through. I reach for it, since I’m still the better cursive-reader between us.
J. J.,
This is ludicrous, writing to you now, when you live well beyond the delivery capabilities of the US Mail. Yet I do it, for the same reason I have done every ludicrous thing in my adult life: because of my deep and abiding respect and affection for you.
I knew we weren’t meant to be together in the traditional way. I never had any illusions that we might become husband and wife, so you need not feel as if you disappointed me. You see, we were something that brought me even more joy: Isolde’s safe harbor and the very closest of friends.
Believe it or not, before I was in your employ, I did not take notes sitting atop tables, or conclude my days tangoing about the library, or write stories about kings and queens and princesses in magical lands. My time with you made me someone else entirely, someone my younger self would barely recognize. It made me a dreamer, a believer. A mother. A partner. You made me those things, J. J. Through you, I became much more than what I’d imagined for myself. And I am forever grateful.
We had our differences, especially at the end. It wasn’t always easy. But much of the time, it was perfect.
I have decided to leave this here, not out of any belief that you might come back for your heart someday (for I know where that will be, as I carry it with me, always, in my own, and know Issy does as well), but that someone else might find this and know love for the invaluable treasure that it is.
With all of mine,
Lou
39
Quentin and Ilay on the comforter-covered floor of my bedroom for a long time, mostly silent, staring up at the ceiling.
“What should we do with it?” he asks finally. “Put it back?”
I tuck away the part of me that feels slightly bruised by our find—both the one-two punch of Fountain’s and Louisa’s letters, and the end of our adventure—and put on my more objective historian hat. “I think we should contact Sharon at the Sprangbur Conservancy and see if they want the letters and box for their collections. The way they talked about Louisa during the tour, as if she were just Fountain’s secretary…I think this might help them reinterpret the relationship and make it known how important she was to both his business and his life. That would make me feel moderately better, to get her some acknowledgment. Maybe we can even ask Eugene and Emily if they would mind someone making a copy of the Edlo manuscript. That could be nice for the Conservancy to have too. Afterall, Louisa was the author, and for all intents and purposes, she was the lady of the house.”
“If they ask how we found it…?”
“Maybe we give them a truncated version of the truth,” I say. “We were interested in the legend of Fountain’s treasure, we did some research, and we found it in a compartment hidden in the outer wall of the cenotaph. We don’t need to mention that you were sitting on the information for almost two decades.”
Quentin pillows his hands beneath his head and stares up at the ceiling again, contemplating. Is he thinking about Fountain and Louisa, about us, or about something else altogether?
He starts talking slowly, as if still putting together his thoughts. “What Fountain said…about missing what’s real and in front of us because we’re busy living inside the stories we tell ourselves.”
“Yeah?”
