Gaynor picked up a pen and began to twirl it between her fingers. “We have millions of manuscripts in our collection. But searching this collection poses its own problems. You see, the newspaper records are instantly available on-screen since they’ve been digitized, but the manuscripts must be ordered. You request them, wait in a queue, which may be a couple of days, and then the desk delivers the actual document for you to review.”

“So digging into this could take days.”

Gaynor nodded slowly, twisting her face, like a doctor delivering bad news to a patient. “Yes, if not weeks or months.”

The magnitude of such a search was exhausting to even think about, especially given that the story of the apothecary was little more than myth as it stood; what if the entire search was in vain, because there wasn’t even a real person to uncover? I sat back in my chair, defeated. It seemed I couldn’t sort truth from lie in any part of my life.

“Chin up,” Gaynor said, nudging my knee with her own. “You’re clearly intrigued by this sort of thing, which is rare in and of itself. I remember well my first week working at the library... I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved the old maps more than anyone else here. People like us need to stick together and keep at it.”

Keep at it. Though I didn’t know what, exactly, I wanted to find—or if there was even anything to find—one thing couldn’t be ignored: the door at the end of Back Alley aligned perfectly with the old maps. And whether the apothecary worked in the area or not, the idea of an old walkway or street, known only to those who lived two hundred years ago but still buried underneath the city, captivated me.

Maybe this was what Gaynor meant by the appeal of the search. I had no idea what lay behind the door—it was likely to be a crumbling mess of brick, filled with rats and spiderwebs—but if there was anything I knew about myself now that I didn’t know a few days ago, it was that looking inside wasn’t always comfortable. Which was exactly why I’d avoided thinking about James thus far, and why I hadn’t yet told my parents or anyone other than Rose about what he’d done. It was, in fact, why I’d distracted myself with the lost apothecary in the first place.

Gaynor and I exchanged phone numbers, and I let her know that I would be in touch if I wanted to request any manuscripts or further search the digitized newspaper records.