The letter O had little meaning for Yehuda Leib, and so when he stared up at the broken skylight above, what he saw was the inside of a giant glass eye: the window had been shattered only within the loop of the letter itself, leaving a jagged black pupil to admit the flurries of nighttime snow drifting down from above.

But significant to Yehuda Leib’s notice was the fact that there was no broken glass on the floor. This suggested a measure of care—perhaps someone had cleaned up the fallen glass, but this seemed inconsistent with the tipped bookcases, the accumulated snow, and the books spilled out on the floor, their pages waterlogged and even frozen with the cold.

It seemed more likely that the glass had been prevented from falling in the first place. This would’ve been a difficult thing to accomplish. And why would anyone want to break the window if they were concerned enough to keep the glass from falling? Yehuda Leib could think of only two reasons: that the sound of falling glass might raise an alarm, and that broken glass underfoot could present a dangerous obstacle.

Both of these reasons suggested an intentional incursion.

The tipped bookcases had served as a sort of staircase, then, allowing the invader to climb down quickly and quietly. Some of the books littering the floor were wet but not yet frozen, which suggested to Yehuda Leib a relatively recent arrival, and the accumulation of snow in the central aisle bore the mark of only one set of footprints: small and narrow, heading inward.

This conjured a chilling thought:

Perhaps the invader was still here.

Yehuda Leib swallowed hard. He was out of time. If he didn’t want to lose the tall man ahead of him, he needed to be moving.

Ducking through the emptied shelves of the fallen bookcases—he had no intention of leaving unnecessary footprints behind—Yehuda Leib hurried forward into the next hall in just enough time to see the tails of the tall man’s coat disappearing through the far door. Yehuda Leib put on an extra burst of speed, but he found himself skidding to a halt as he entered the following hall: the tall man in the black coat was not, as he’d been the last sixteen times, just leaving.

Instead, he was waiting.

The man stood in the center of Hall Q, looking back at Yehuda Leib. It was such a surprise that Yehuda Leib neglected to take notice of his face before the man turned toward the offshoot door—the first turn he’d made since Yehuda Leib had begun to follow him.

Had it been his father after all?