Page 103 of The Librarians
Madeleine proceeds to give detailed instructions on how to use the two bug scanners Conrad borrowed from her earlier in the day. All the trained librarians take copious notes—Astrid writes down every word, keeping her nerves in check by keeping her hands busy. When Madeleine hangs up, Sophie hesitates a moment and wraps an arm around Astrid’s shoulders.
“You okay? You don’t have to look for the bugs tonight. Just go home and go to bed—take something to help you sleep, if you need to. That should be good enough for tonight.”
Around the room, everyone nods in agreement.
It’s tempting, but the thought of not knowing the location of the spy devices bothers Astrid even more than the idea of a surreptitious search.
“I’m okay,” she says. “I’ll be even better after I get a general notion of where the bugs are. It’s just that—”
She realizes she forgot to ask Madeleine an important question. “It’s just that, can anyone tell me how long I’ll have to live like that, with those bugs in my place?”
The four people who came from Conrad’s house exchange glances.
“That will depend,” says Hazel, “on how charming and persuasive Jonathan can be.”
Astrid leaves with Sophie to pick up her car from Sophie’s house. Jonathan decides that he will join forces with Conrad’s PI—or at least, be close enough to make a difference, if push comes to shove. Ryan, after a look at Hazel and Conrad, walks away with Jonathan.
At this point, more reinforcement probably wouldn’t be of any use. But Hazel, like Jonathan, doesn’t want to be too far away. So she takes Conrad to a neighborhood bar a mile or so from Astrid’s place, an old and slightly run-down place where her parents used to attend trivia night.
It’s the second time in three days she and Conrad face each other across a table. Last time she was full of wonder and hope, but this time she’s jittery, her facade of nonchalance peeling and cracking. She takes a sip of her mocktail, not really tasting anything.
He studies her. She is momentarily distracted by the sight of his close-cropped hair. Memory rushes back of her hand on the back of his head, the smooth yet prickling sensation on her palm, the heat of the kiss, his weight on her—
“I need to tell you something, Hazel,” he says, stirring his drink with an agave fiber straw.
“You, sir, need to tell me a lot of things,” she answers more severely than she needs to. “What were you doing at the library on Game Night, for instance? And why are you back so soon, when you told me you were going to be gone for a week?”
The ice in his glass clinks. “I said I’d be gone a week because at the time I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with Perry’s murder, your possible involvement, and seeing you in person on top of that. I wanted to take care of everything on Perry’s end first and I hoped a week would be enough.”
He’d lowered his eyes to his drink, but now looks back at her. Her heart quakes, not from the intensity of his gaze but from its simple honesty. “As for what I was doing at the library, I thought it would be obvious by this point. I had no idea Perry came to Austin again but I knew you were in town because your grandmother posted about the cookies you made forher book club. And then she wrote that you’d be starting at the branch library.
“I went to the library’s website, saw that there would be an evening of board games, and knew you’d be there. I bought a mask, then chickened out and left town. The day of, I changed my mind and came back. Got to the library fifteen minutes before it closed—and lost my nerve again.”
Has she ever heard anything that so closely resembles the music of the spheres—that is, apart from when he said he’d moved to Austin in part because of an old white lie on her part?
There’s also the quesadilla, which she finally tasted when he was doing a sweep of his house after speaking to Madeleine. On Madeira, when she told him about the dish—to burnish her largely expired Texan credentials—he’d never heard of it. What he made tonight—scrambled eggs, pepper jack cheese, diced tomato, and avocado between crispy flour tortillas—was exactly as she’d described, exactly her dad’s recipe.
“Nowcan I tell you something?” asks present-day Conrad, his expression solemn.
She takes a sip of her mocktail. She’s already forgotten what fancy name it goes by—it’s just ginger ale, club soda, lime juice, and grenadine. Yet the combination of sweetness and bright acidity, with the sharpness of ginger and the deep, puckering fruit notes of pomegranate and black currant—she’s never tasted anything so complex and so beautiful.
“Yes?” she says.
He doesn’t need to tell her anything else. Tomorrow the melancholy will come back. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, right now, she feels like vigorously shaken champagne, full of tiny bubbles of joy inside.
“I hope it will not come as a huge surprise that I hired Madeleine after I learned that you were married to Kit,” he begins.
She already guessed as much. She was able to glean a great deal from hacking into an old laptop she found at Kit’s London apartment, carefully hidden under a box of twenty-year-old issues ofThe Economist. But what Conrad was able to tell her—the existence of the surveillance footage showing Kit at the library, for instance—clearly indicates that he and Perry, or the PIs they’d hired, undertook a much deeper investigation.
Also, the fact that he is well-versed in Nainai’s social media presence.
“Did you hire only Madeleine or did you also have someone in Singapore?”
“I had someone in Singapore. Between him and Madeleine, I got a deep background on you but I didn’t have you followed. If I hadn’t known you I would have, but I did, and I’d have felt like too much of a creep.”
“Okay,” she says.
At this moment, if he said that he’d indeed had her tailed, hell, even if he told her that he climbed through her window to watch her sleep, she’d reply,I am willing to be gratified by your obsession, provided you dial it down a notch in the future and do not attempt to exert undue control over my life.
