“Those romantic types have it in their heads that it’s better to jump in and figure things out later.”

“And us practical types want to have a plan with all the angles considered.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” Wallace bristled. “So I waited a couple of years and married someone else. Nice gal. Smart gal. But she wasn’t Flo. We had thirty decent years together.”

“Are thirty decent years good enough to make up for the fifty great ones you could have had with Florence?”

“You’re dumber than you look if you have to ask that question.”

“I have to decide whether or not I’m willing to make room in my life for a man who takes up a whole lot of space,” she confessed.

“It would change everything you do.”

“It would,” she agreed. “Are you glad you didn’t ask Florence to marry you? Was it the right choice?”

The man rolled his magnified eyes behind his lenses. “I took the safe path. I wanted security. I wanted to avoid making mistakes. Hell, I wanted to study history and work for the National Archives. But on paper, it didn’t make sense. There wasn’t any real money in that. Not enough to raise a family on. So I went to school for accounting. Job security and all that crap. I punched my clock for that plant for forty-three years. I saved my paychecks, lived a comfortable life. I played historian on the weekends. Turns out, it didn’t matter, since Regina and I never had a family to support.”

“Do you regret it? Any of it?”

“You’re asking an old man to look back on his life’s choices and tell you if you’re about to make a mistake.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“My life ain’t yours. My regrets—whether they exist or not—aren’t yours.”

She had expected as much. But still had hoped for a magic bullet.

“Okay. Next hypothesis. I think we’ve been looking at A. Campbell all wrong.” She saw it in his cagey expression. Wallace had already gotten there, and he hadn’t said anything to anyone.

“Say it,” he insisted.

She took a breath. “I think A. Campbell was Ava Campbell, not Aaron.”

“Not much of a stretch of the imagination there, considering the evidence,” he said.

“The handwriting on the manuscript in the secret room that matched the captions on the photos. The fact that Aaron’s pipe was next to the armchair, not on the desk. The fact that Ava Campbell would disappear from the public eye for long stretches of time. Possibly about the same length of time it would take to finish a manuscript,” she recapped.

“Not to mention the romantic story lines in the books. They had the fingerprints of a woman all over them.”

“I missed that one,” Maggie confessed.