The next layer was paper—loose paper made stiff and brittle and dark with age. The writing on the pages was beautiful, precise, and very dense, but it wasn’t Myrnin’s hand; she knew how he wrote, and it was far messier than this. She began reading the first paper.

My dear friend, I have been in New York for some years now, and missing you greatly. I know that you were angry with me in Prague, and I do not blame you for it. I was hasty and unwise in my dealings with my father, but I honestly do believe that he left me little choice. So, dear Myrnin, I beg you, undertake a journey and come to visit. I know travel no longer agrees with you, but I think if I spend another year alone, I will give up entirely. I would call it a great favor if you would visit.

It was signed, with an ornate flourish, Amelie. As in, Amelie, Founder of Morganville, and Claire’s ultimate—although she didn’t like to think of it this way—boss/owner.

Before Claire could open her mouth to ask, Myrnin’s cool white fingers reached over her shoulder and plucked the page neatly from her hand. “I said determine if we can use these things, not read my private mail,” he said.

“Hey—was that why you came to America? Because she wrote to you?”

Myrnin looked down at the paper for a moment, then crumpled it into a ball and threw it in a large plastic trash bin against the wall. “No,” he said. “I didn’t come when she asked me. I came when I had to.”

“When was that?” Claire didn’t bother to protest how unfair it was that he wanted her to not read things to figure out if they needed them. Or that since he’d kept the letter all this time, he should think before throwing it away.

She just reached for the next loose page in the box.

“I arrived about five years after she wrote to me,” Myrnin said. “In other words, too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Are you simply going to badger me with personal questions, or are you planning to do what I told you to do?”

“Doing it,” Claire pointed out. Myrnin was irritated, but that didn’t bother her, not anymore. She didn’t take anything he said personally. “And I do have the right to ask questions, don’t I?”

“Why? Because you put up with me?” He waved his hand before she could respond. “Yes, yes, all right. Amelie was in a bad way in those days—she had lost everything, you see, and it’s hard for us to start over and over and over. Eternal youth doesn’t mean you don’t get tired of the constant struggles. So . . . by the time she wrote to me again, she had done something quite insane.”

“What?”