“He did,” Ralph repeated. “You said Alex had a lot of guilt as a kid. Enough to kill himself? Maybe. Plenty of young gay men do and did, especially then. But the letter was the living proof that he had a future where someone cared about him. He got that much, even if you couldn’t prevent him from contracting a tragic illness, and it was a reason to carry on with his life.” He fell back to the study of his cards. “Then there was the Harry Potter situation. I think that’s particularly illustrative of the good you’ve done, Loren.”

“Good I’ve done,” Hayes said scornfully.

“What was the Harry Potter situation?” I asked, although I already had an idea.

Loren Hayes took a long, measuring look at Terry Gallagher, then lowered his head and told it. “The last year I drove the Bookmobile was 2009. At that time I had a Monday stop at the hospital. Sometimes a few of the kids from the cancer ward would march out, if they were having a good day, for a poke around. There was a girl who stalked in one day in wizard robes, absolutely furious, shouting that goldarn it, J. K. Rowling had ended the frickin’ book on a frickin’ cliff-hanger, and she was going to die before she knew how it all came out. And she threw a copy of the second-to-last Harry Potter at me. Well, the final Potter book hadn’t come out in her time, but it had in mine. She wanted magic. I gave her some.”

“That kid finished the series before J. K. Rowling did,” Ralph said with a raised eyebrow. “After she passed away, someone in her family thoughtfully returned her library books. I recognized Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows right off as something that didn’t exist yet, and I set it aside, put it out of circulation. After reading it myself, of course. While I am not utterly without self-control, I’m also not a masochist, and I very much wanted to know about Snape.”

“What’s your angle?” I asked Terry Gallagher. “You’ve heard all this crap before, I take it. And you believe it?”

Gallagher gave me a dismal, harried, out-of-sorts look. “Who do you think returned The Deathly Hallows to the library? My daughter was too distraught to do anything after Chloë died, so I did it for her. My grandkid loved those books.” He paused, tugged at one corner of his bushy white mustache. “I read it to her, the last one. When she was too weak to pick up the book. I wanted to know how it came out, too.”

“I’ve thought about this for decades,” Hayes said. “Tried to make sense of it. I know this much: The people who show up in the Bookmobile from other eras are there because they’re yearning for something. Yearning is the only thing that can reach across time that way. You can’t give them something they don’t need. Terry’s granddaughter needed to know if Snape was a bad guy or not. She didn’t need to know about all the shit that was going to happen after she passed. Assassinations and natural disasters and terrorism. She had a story to finish before her own story was finished. That’s what she was there for. That’s what I could do for her.”