Page 113 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Esther pulled down the neck of her sweater and exposed the first few words that were inked across her skin, and she saw the moment Maram realized what they said. For the first time, real emotion moved across her face, her mouth trembling before it smoothed out again. “I like that,” she said.

“What was the name of your parents’ bookstore?” Esther asked.

Maram touched a hand to the collar of her silk blouse. There was a distant quality to her expression, a boat receding from the shoreline. “Los Libros de Luz Azul.”

Esther turned this over on her tongue,Blue Light Books,then smiled. “Luz Azul.”

Maram, who’d given herself a name that could be read in a mirror, smiled back. “Our family loved palindromes. They’re an old magic, you know.”

“What happened to the store?” Esther swallowed her pride and admitted, “I looked for it.”

“It’s still there,” Maram said, “though in a rather different form. Someday, I’ll tell you that story.”

Esther decided to take this as a promise. “One last question,” she said. “For now.”

“Go on.”

“What did you think I would ask you?”

“Oh,” Maram said. Her gaze lingered on Esther’s face, perhaps doing what Esther had done when she’d first seen Maram standing in Richard’sstudy: searching for signs of herself. “I thought you’d ask if I regret doing what I did.”

Esther did not know which act Maram meant. Did she regret leaving her daughter all those years ago, or betraying the Library she’d left her for? But she rose to the bait and said, “Do you?”

At that, Maram reached out and brushed the back of her hand against Esther’s. It was a strange piece of contact, intimate even in its oddness, and Esther shivered. “I don’t know yet,” Maram said, and Nicholas came back into the room.

It was Collins who picked Joanna and Esther up at Heathrow, idling curbside in a huge black Lexus with tinted windows. He had the window rolled down despite the cold and the sight of his face in profile made Joanna’s stomach flip with nerves.

They hadn’t really had a chance to talk since their kiss on the front porch, over two months ago now. Or rather, they hadn’t talked about the kiss itself. They’d spoken of plenty else, some of it logistical and some of it personal, trading stories through phone calls and text messages and once, disastrously, a video call in which Joanna couldn’t get the sound to work. Collins had left a few days after Esther and Nicholas had come back through the mirror; first to return the car to his friends in Boston and make his explanations to them and to his sister, then on a flight back to the Library in order to take over the Library’s ward-setting and to open up one end of a different mirror spell that used his and Joanna’s blood, so they didn’t have to rely on Maram’s and Cecily’s. Also because Nicholas had absolutely no idea how to run a household and it was already starting to mutiny under his inept captaincy. Unlike Collins, the rest of the Library staff had been hired by more or less legitimate means and reacted with understandable dismay when Nicholas had magnanimously decreed them all “free to go.”

“They’re not indentured servants, dumbass,” Collins had said. “They’reyour paid employees and they think you just fired them. Plus, what were you planning to do, cook your own dinner? Dust your own chandeliers? Ha!”

Collins had, somewhat clumsily, invited Joanna to come with him, but she had declined. She wasn’t ready yet to leave her home and her father’s memory, which still clung to her like a hand on her shoulder, sometimes comforting, sometimes grasping. Nicholas had decided to maintain the Library wards for the time being, but Joanna hadn’t put her own back up since the night Collins had stolen them. He’d hidden them out in the forest, wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved down into the damp, moldering hollow of a tree, and though he’d given them back to her, she hadn’t used them again. She felt exposed without their protection, like a door left open, but she kept thinking about what Collins had said about cracking the lid of his world, about the light coming in. So far, the only bad thing that’d happened was she’d had to officially connect her house to the electrical grid, though she’d left that particular task to Esther, since it was her field, after all.

Cecily, of course, was overjoyed. She’d dissolved into tears as soon as Esther had stepped through the mirror and hadn’t really stopped crying for days. At first Esther had been her usual composed self; she’d seen Cecily sitting there in her old bedroom and said, “Hi, Mom,” in a perfectly neutral voice, as if greeting her mother after an absence of minutes, not years. But when Cecily touched her, it was as if something in her broke. Her face lost all its pent-up control, shattering around the fault lines of a decade, and she began to sob into her mother’s shoulder.

“Oh, my little baby,” Cecily said, stroking her curling hair. “It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re home.”

“You lied to me,” Esther sobbed. “You all lied to me.”

“Yes,” Cecily said, in those same soothing tones. “We did. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t ever lie to me again.”

“I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

Despite the near-constant flow of tears, Cecily was so demonstrably overjoyed to have both her daughters in one place that she hugged and kissed Nicholas and Collins each time she saw them, as well. She was thrilled not only by Esther’s presence, but by the fact that she could now roll down the driveway anytime she liked, Gretchen hanging her furry head out the window, car filled with Tupperwares of lasagna and salad and curry and all the other meals she’d been longing to bring her daughters for the past ten years. After the sixth time Esther went to bed behind a closed door and woke to find Cecily lovingly stroking her hair, she suggested they all have a chat about boundaries—“Psychological, not magical”—but it hadn’t happened yet.

Cecily was in fact staying in the house for the two weeks Joanna would be gone, to feed the cat. Once he’d finally deigned to enter, it was as if he’d lived there all his life, and there wasn’t a corner he hadn’t shed into. For a while Joanna had used him as an excuse for why she couldn’t visit the Library, but even she knew it was just that: an excuse.

The truth was, she was frightened.

She had never really been anywhere and never really done anything other than care for the books, had never really known anybody other than her family. Nor had she ever tried to let herself be known by others. She didn’t know if she could.

Yet here she was. In England. Trying.

Esther spotted the Lexus right after Joanna had, but she was afflicted by none of Joanna’s nerves and immediately shouted “Collins!” waving her arm like a traffic conductor. Joanna was wearing what she always wore—black jeans and her red wool coat (though she’d let her mother trim her hair), but she was worried somehow that she’d look different than she had that night on the porch, that she’d look different to Collins.

He didn’t look the same to her. He looked better.

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