As if this world weren’t charming enough, N. E. Endsley has carved out a second office space within the walls of A Measure of Prose’s first floor. I thought my brain had its fill of awe and wonder, but I was wrong. I’m having a hard time keeping my mouth closed and my hands at my sides.

It is maybe a square foot or so smaller than the fort, but you wouldn’t be able to tell, if it weren’t for the low ceiling. There is another desk pressed into the corner—this one made of metal, not wood—that takes up most of the space, aside from the lines of modern plastic shelves filled to the brim with journals: leather bound, Moleskines, and spirals. Slim wooden boxes with intricate carvings are stacked atop one another, with tiny typed labels that display dates from four or five years ago to the present. There are piles of elegant pen cases worth almost as much as the fountain pens they protect, and bottles of ink that look like they belong in Flourish and Blotts, not in a cellar-like wing of Val’s bookstore.

But they do belong. This space feels like a reflection of him—both Old World and New, modern and inexplicably traditional in its melancholy and its contradictory contents.

Nolan is watchful, unspeaking. His gaze says he is showing me something vitally important to him, as important as the cemetery where his sisters are buried, and he desperately wants to know what I think.

His eyes want to know if it’s enough to make me stop pretending, to make me stay.

But I can’t think clearly. I feel like Belle examining the Beast’s massive library or Cinderella when the slipper fits. Every heroine from every story I’ve ever read is bursting from her bindings to come flutter in my chest and assure me that this is okay, this feeling of bigness and rightness and wrongness all mixed together. It’s more than okay that I am experiencing something other than grief. It’s okay that I’m not entirely sure if the feeling is a good one or a bad one.

“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” Nolan says, breaking the silence. “Except Alex, but he doesn’t count. He just wants to use the Wi-Fi, since we’re right above the router. We think the space was built to hold electronics, like speaker system equipment and stuff. Or at least that’s our best guess, since it’s ventilated. See?” He points at a vent beside one of the shelves, its little plastic slats fluttering open on a silent wind.