AN HOUR LATER we reach the East End. Scott tries to pretend he’s not overawed by Realitycrash. Eddie was expecting us, but I can see how tense and tired she is. She leads us to the bookshelf containing all the books her company has ever published, and here Scott’s cool facade finally cracks.

“Ray Bradbury!” he lets slip, as jittery as a five-year-old in a sweet shop. “Isaac Asimov! Kurt Vonnegut!”

“Well, we did once have the paperback rights,” Poppy says behind us. Scott spins around, and I witness a strange scene. I can feel Scott’s heart initially swell, as if unfolding like a paper kite, and then crash to the floor. He changes—forever. He looks at Poppy and his world will never be the same again, and I see it all and yet I don’t know why or if it is of any use.

Andrea brings some mugs of steaming tea, a plate of scones, some cucumber canapés, and a bag of incredible-smelling Cornish pasties. But Scott can’t eat a bite of it. Who could when his whole inner life is being rearranged, brick by brick?

We learn about blurbs and cover designs. “We argue over the front and back covers for longer than we discuss the four hundred pages in between,” Poppy explains, and I catch Scott staring in rapture at her black-painted lips as she speaks. “Most people pick up a book because the cover or specific words on the back appeal to them.”

“Which ones?” Scott asks.

“Unfortunately, we have almost no idea, Master Scott,” Ralph says curtly. “The truth is that nobody knows why people buy the books they do.”

Poppy asks Scott what he’s reading at the moment, and naturally his answer—The King of Dreams by Robert Silverberg—makes an impression. When Poppy puts the same question to me, Scott answers for me, “He’s always carrying Jane Austen with him,” before pulling Pride and Prejudice from my bag.

“Hands off!” I hiss.

“Oh,” says Eddie. “A library edition. It’s lovely. May I?”

It’s hard to watch somebody else hold something that Madelyn has touched and that contains her experiences and thoughts and dreams. However, Eddie handles Madelyn’s book with great care, as if it were a small animal. She opens it and reads the slip stuck to the inside front cover, studying the various entries and the date and the name of the most recent borrower.

Quietly she says to me, “Madelyn Zeidler. The ice maiden.”

I stare at her quizzically. Why does she call Madelyn the ice maiden? It’s true, though: Madelyn is trapped behind a transparent wall of frozen memories and ice-encrusted hopes.

I hear that the others are still discussing cover designs and blurbs.

“The girl on the fifth floor,” Eddie says.