He handed me the envelope.

The postmark showed it had been sent from Monterey, California. I pulled out the photograph and stared at it in disbelief. For once the image didn’t show just a shadow. There was Alicia Gris, thirty years on, looking at the camera and smiling from what seemed to me the most beautiful place in the world, a sort of peninsula with cliffs and mysterious forests that stretched out into the sea through the mist of the Pacific Ocean. On one side, a sign read point lobos.

I turned the photograph over and met with Alicia’s handwriting;

The end of the road. It was worth it. Thanks again for saving me, Fermín, once and so many times. Save yourself too and tell Julián to make us all immortal: we always trust he will.

I love you

Alicia

My eyes filled with tears. I wanted to believe that in that dreamlike place, so far from our Barcelona, Alicia had found her peace and her destiny.

“May I keep it?” I asked in a broken voice.

“It’s yours.”

I knew then that at last I’d found the final piece of my story, and that, from that moment on, what awaited me was life and, with luck, fiction.

Epilogue

Barcelona
August 9, 1992

A young man, already showing a few gray hairs, walks through the streets of a shadowy Barcelona under a moon that spills in a silver ribbon over Rambla de Santa Mónica, guiding his steps. A girl of about ten holds his hand, her eyes full of mystery at the promise her father made her in the evening, the promise of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

“Alicia, you mustn’t tell anyone what you’re about to see today. No one.”

“Then it will be our secret,” she says in a whisper.

Her father sighs, hiding behind that sad smile that has followed him through life. “Of course. It will be our secret, always.”

It is then that the sky explodes into a tree of light, and for a moment the fireworks of the closing ceremony capture the night of a Barcelona that will never return.

Shortly afterward father and daughter, like figures of vapor, merge with the crowds that flood the Ramblas, their footsteps forever lost in the labyrinth of the spirits.

Author’s Note

Illustration inspired by an image of the interior of the Sagrada Familia, photographed by Francesc Català-Roca.

About the Author

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN is the author of eight novels, including the international bestselling and critically acclaimed Cemetery of Forgotten Books series: The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, The Prisoner of Heaven, and The Labyrinth of the Spirits. His work, which also includes prizewinning young adult novels, has been translated into more than fifty different languages and published around the world, garnering numerous international awards and reaching millions of readers. He lives in Los Angeles.