Technically, they were in Charlestown, Boston’s oldest neighborhood, a residential stretch of peninsular land that used to be mostly brick town houses and Irish bars but was now sprouting full-service luxury apartment buildings and high-end restaurants like it was suffering from an infection of expensive fungus. Hailey had been to Charlestown before—to that exact spot, actually—during a handful of self-guided tours down the Freedom Trail; when you were responsible for your own schooling and you had aspirations that involved a college degree, the city had to be your classroom. Forging public school records wasn’t difficult; but knowing she’d one day be competing with students who had access to textbooks, teachers, and parental guidance had given her the incentive to try and cover as much ground as she could.

But she hadn’t been back to the Bunker Hill Monument since her early teens. As impressive as the giant, nearly two-hundred-year-old obelisk was—as well as the adjoining Masonic lodge that sat on the far side of the monument from where they were standing, housing Revolutionary-era memorabilia—for Hailey the site didn’t hold the appeal that some of the Trail’s other highlights offered. At Faneuil Hall, there were restaurants, souvenir shops, even street performers. In the Boston Common, there was a skating rink and a carousel, and you could ride the swan boats in the Public Garden. But to Hailey, the Bunker Hill Monument was an anachronistic hunk of granite; even as a historic site, it had never made much sense to her.

For someone who liked the pieces to fit together, the Bunker Hill Monument was intellectually challenging. Perhaps that was why the place had stuck in her memory, enough that the symbol in the copper-leafed book had set her mind roiling. The research she’d done on her laptop before she and Nick had maneuvered back up through the Infinite Corridor and across town had only reaffirmed the contradictory facts she remembered from her earlier visits.

“The idea to build something grand and permanent to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill came about after a breakfast meeting of wealthy and prominent Bostonians in 1823,” Hailey continued. She saw that Nick was scanning the crowd, probably looking for law enforcement, but she kept her attention on the granite monster straight ahead. “They then held a design competition which gave us—this. The cornerstone was placed on June 17, 1825; a hundred thousand people packed this park, Daniel Webster gave the oration, and the ceremony was cohosted by the Marquis de Lafayette, the French war hero who fifty years earlier had helped the Americans defeat the British.”