The Professor beamed, but only I had seen Lyman Shepherd in his kitchen. Only I had heard how easily he might have decided something else. Taken me with him, or destroyed me for knowing him as well as he knew me.

“I am sorry for the loss of the young woman, I truly am. But it’s difficult to imagine a better resolution for us,” he said. But I could. An improbable one perhaps, but had I written it, my happy ending would have involved Dolores surviving in spite of them all—her father, her husband, and her attendant.

“Are you happy?” I asked, gently taking the Professor’s hands away. I was not ready to celebrate, my tragically bought freedom or the way it changed nothing for Harvey and I.

“I’m relieved, ma petite,” he said, the distinctive sobriety returning to his voice. “I’m only ever relieved.”

NO. 11

  NO. 11  

In 1926, Le Château Apartments came to life in the Golden Square Mile, a spectacular addition to the city’s skyline. A jewel of French architecture, it rose more than a dozen stories, a collection of half turrets and gable peaks adorning the building’s facade and crowned in green copper. It was a castle, and the first time we stood before it, our heads fully tilted to take in its staggering height, Ettie and I decided it was home before our tour even began.

“I’m staying here,” I’d promised Camille, squeezing her short and wide frame. “For good. I wouldn’t go anywhere.”

“Not even to see the world?” she asked between sniffles. “You can do anything you want now,” she said, thinking the portion of Dolores’s estate that Lyman left for me was the freedom I had gained.

“What I want is peace of mind. For all three of us.” I nodded. “And we have that now.” I didn’t tell her about the wilted bouquet of the three Keepsakes or the epiphany they’d spawned; all that mattered was that the same not be our fate.

“And what about her family?” Ettie asked while we inspected the flat’s guest bathroom, as if I would find any criticism for a private one after the lonely communal life I had led inside the Vault. I closed the medicine cabinet and watched my friend through the mirror. “Are you still concerned with their fate?”

“I can’t help it,” I said, turning my eyes on my own reflection. “They have lost a child.”

I’d seen them in the cemetery after Dolores was gone and buried. I’d stayed away from her funeral, afraid that my presence might offend, but on December 7, 1925—on what would have been Dolores’s thirty-ninth birthday—I had to be there. Ettie had offered to accompany me, but I’d insisted on going alone. Perhaps I knew that they would be there, or one of them at least.