The windshield wipers ground out their rhythm against the salt spray, a metronome set to the tempo of the Atlantic. Maren Halliday hunched over the rental car's steering wheel, her rental contract still folded in the cup holder beside a travel mug of gas station coffee gone cold three towns ago. The coastal road unspooled ahead in a series of hairpins carved into grey rock, the guardrails spotted with rust and lichen. To her left, the ocean churned brown and restless beneath a sky the color of old pewter.

She had expected fog. The guidebooks had promised fog. Instead the weather had delivered this raw, wind-scoured clarity, the kind that left nowhere to hide.

The GPS on her phone had lost signal two miles back, and the rental car's built-in navigation had given up entirely somewhere around the last abandoned gas station. Maren did not mind. She had been driving toward Harrow Cove on paper maps and a hand-drawn schematic from the estate lawyer for the better part of four hours, and the schematic showed every unmarked turn with a patience that technology could not match.

The town appeared between one curve and the next, the way such towns always did on this stretch of the Maine coast: crouched low against the land, as if bracing itself against the wind. Maren eased her foot off the accelerator and let the rental coast through the first of the approach roads, past a hand-painted sign nailed to a post that read HARROW COVE, POP. 1,143. The number had been repainted recently. She wondered who had bothered.

The storefronts came in clusters of three and four, Victorian frames gone soft with salt and time. A hardware store with a striped awning faded to the color of weak tea. A pharmacy with a cracked apothecary window. A dry cleaner whose OPEN sign listed gently to the left, as though it had been giving up for years. The buildings crowded the narrow street with their shoulders, and above their second-story windows, the gables pointed upward like the folded ears of uncertain horses.

There was no one on the sidewalks.

Maren pulled into a gravel lot beside what appeared to be the only restaurant in town, its windows steamed over from the inside. She killed the engine. For a moment she sat with her hands still on the wheel, listening to the cooling tick of the rental's engine and the distant, wet crash of waves against something below the cliffs. The wind found a seam somewhere in the driver's door and threaded through, carrying brine and something else, something green and vegetal, the smell of low tide and kelp.

She got out. The gravel crunched under her shoes, and the wind caught the hem of her coat and pulled. She buttoned it higher and stood for a moment looking down the main road as it curved toward the harbor. The pier was visible from here, jutting out into the water like a long grey finger. Empty. A few weathered posts. A coil of rope gone stiff with salt. No boats tied up. No figures at the end of it staring out at the horizon the way she had always imagined people on such piers must do.

The sign over the restaurant read THE ANCHOR AND OAR in hand-carved letters. A bell above the door chimed once, thin and apologetic, when she pushed inside.

The interior was warm and smelled of butter, coffee, and something fried. A handful of locals occupied the booths, their heads turning in unison as Maren stepped in, the way heads turn for any stranger in a small town, assessing and dismissing in the same motion. A woman behind the counter glanced up from a register, then back down, uninterested. A man in a wool cap nursed a mug in a corner booth and did not look up at all.

Maren chose a stool at the counter, set her bag on the empty seat beside her, and ordered coffee and whatever the kitchen had ready. The woman behind the counter, whose name tag read DELLA, brought the coffee in a thick ceramic mug and slid a laminated menu across the Formica.

"New in town," Della said. It was not a question.

"Passing through," Maren said.

Della's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "Most folks are."

The coffee was better than it had any right to be. Maren wrapped both hands around the mug and let the heat soak into her fingers, which had gone stiff from the wheel. She did not open the bag beside her. She did not take out the legal documents, the schematic, the small notebook in which she had begun to keep her own observations in the careful hand that her mentor had once praised and then, in his last months, gently mocked. She drank the coffee and watched the window.

Through the steamed glass she could see the main road, and beyond it the slope down to the harbor. A figure in a long coat was walking along the seawall now, moving with the unhurried pace of someone who had measured the same distance ten thousand times. The figure paused, looked out at the empty pier, then continued on.

Maren set down the mug.

"Excuse me," she said to Della. "The woman walking along the seawall. Would that be Evangeline Croft?"

Della's hands stilled on the register. For a moment the only sound in the restaurant was the low murmur of the booths and the creak of the sign outside shifting on its hinges.

"Depends who's asking," Della said.

"My name is Maren Halliday. I have an appointment with Miss Croft at three."

"You the cataloguer?"

"Yes."

Della studied her for a long moment, the way one studies a card one has been dealt and does not particularly care for. Then she reached beneath the counter, produced a slip of paper, and wrote a number on it in blue pen.

"Call her from the parking lot. She doesn't like people just showing up at the house." Della slid the slip across the counter. "And when you go up Hemlock Hill, watch the road. The storm last week took out a stretch of the shoulder about halfway up. Town hasn't gotten around to fixing it."

Maren pocketed the slip. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Buy a piece of pie. Kitchen's got blueberry."

Maren bought the pie. It was good, the crust flaking against the fork, the berries sharp and bright. She ate it slowly, the way she had been taught to eat in places she did not yet understand: with attention, with patience, with the willingness to be taught. The locals at the booths returned to their conversations. The man in the wool cap finished his coffee, left a folded dollar on the table, and pushed out into the wind without looking at her.

When the clock above the counter showed quarter to three, Maren paid her bill, shouldered her bag, and stepped back out into the salt air. The wind had picked up, and the clouds to the west had thickened into a pewter mass that promised weather later. She walked to the rental, called the number Della had given her, and listened to it ring four times before a voice answered.

"Miss Croft? This is Maren Halliday. I believe we have an appointment at three."

A pause. The line hissed with the particular static of coastal reception. Then the voice came back, low and unhurried, with the faint trace of an accent Maren could not place.

"You're earlier than I expected."

"I'm on time."

Another pause, longer this time. Somewhere in the background Maren could hear the sound of water, not waves but something closer, a tap running or a kettle being filled.

"Drive carefully on the hill," the voice said. "The shoulder is gone in places. When you reach the gate, leave it as you find it. The wind off the harbor has a habit of opening things that ought to stay closed."

The line went dead.

Maren lowered the phone and stood for a moment in the gravel lot, looking up the road that curved away from the harbor and into the trees. Hemlock Hill was not visible from here, but she could see the road's first switchback, and beyond it the dark mass of evergreens that climbed the slope toward whatever waited at the top.

She got back into the rental, started the engine, and pulled out onto the road.

The town fell away behind her in stages. First the storefronts, then the houses set back from the road behind their fences, then the seawall and the empty pier, and finally the harbor itself, reduced to a grey comma in the side mirror before the road curved inland and the trees closed over the sky. The asphalt narrowed. The guardrails gave way to nothing but a low stone wall and then to no wall at all, just a suggestion of drop into the underbrush and beyond that the sound, always present, of the sea.

Maren drove slowly. The road was as bad as Della had warned. In one place the shoulder had crumbled away entirely, leaving a ragged edge of broken asphalt and a view of the slope falling away into scrub pine. She inched the rental past it with both hands on the wheel, her breath held without her noticing.

She had been a cataloguer for eleven years. She had worked in estate libraries from the Hebrides to the Outer Banks, from the limestone caves of Kentucky to the shuttered parlors of Newport. She had opened boxes in attics that had not been opened in sixty years. She had read letters in handwriting so faded it looked like the dead were trying to whisper. She had catalogued, with care and without sentiment, the private libraries of strangers, and she had learned, in that time, to approach a new place the way one approaches a sleeping animal: quietly, with respect, and with the understanding that the animal would wake when it was ready.

Hemlock Hill rose above her through the windshield. The trees grew denser as the road climbed, the hemlocks pressing close on both sides, their branches laced together overhead so that the light came through in narrow shafts. The rental's headlights came on automatically, though it was still an hour from dusk. Maren let them stay on.

The gate appeared around a final bend, wrought iron gone black with age, standing open between two stone pillars capped with lichen. She pulled through, closed the gate carefully behind her as instructed, and continued up the drive.

The house came into view between the trunks of the last stand of hemlocks, and Maren stopped the car.

It was larger than she had expected. A sprawling Victorian in the same idiom as the storefronts below, but grander, set on a rise above the harbor so that its gables and widow's walks commanded the whole curve of the cove. The clapboards had been painted the color of old bone. The windows caught the last of the afternoon light and threw it back in pale, flat planes. A porch wrapped the front of the house, its railings carved in a pattern of leaves and waves that Maren would have to look at more closely later. A figure stood at the top of the porch steps, hands folded at the waist, watching the rental approach.

Maren killed the engine. The wind off the harbor moved through the hemlocks with a long, low sound, and somewhere in the branches a bird called once and then was quiet.

She got out of the car, shouldered her bag, and walked toward the figure on the porch, who did not move, who only watched, and who, when Maren reached the bottom of the steps, spoke first.

"You are not what I expected either," the woman said.

Her name was Evangeline Croft, and she was older than her voice had suggested on the phone, the lines of her face cut deep by wind and salt, her grey hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore the same long coat Maren had seen her in from the restaurant window, and beneath it a wool dress the color of moss. Her eyes were the color of the sea outside, and they did not blink.

Maren stopped at the foot of the steps.

"What did you expect?" she said.

Evangeline Croft did not answer. She turned, the hem of her coat brushing the porch boards, and walked through the front door without waiting to see if Maren would follow.

The door, however, remained open.

Maren stood for a moment at the bottom of the steps, the wind pressing at her back, the open door a dark rectangle against the pale clapboards. Then she climbed the porch, her bag catching on a splintered rail, and stepped inside.

The hallway smelled of woodsmoke and something older, a mineral scent like wet stone in a closed room. The floor was wide pine, the boards cupped with age, and a runner of faded green carpet ran the length of the corridor, its edges frayed into pale threads. Evangeline Croft was already ten paces ahead, her footsteps soundless on the wood, her silhouette narrow and upright against the dim.

"You may close the door," Evangeline said without turning. "The draft is unkind to the wallpaper."

Maren pushed the door shut. The latch caught with a soft, mechanical click, and the hallway grew quieter still. She set her bag down beside a hall table stacked with letters, their envelopes yellowed and curling, and followed.

The house opened into a parlor on the right, its windows facing the cove, and on the left a smaller room lined with bookshelves. Evangeline did not enter either. She continued past a staircase whose banister had been worn to a pale honey by decades of hands, past a doorway hung with a heavy curtain of dark green, and stopped at a small writing desk that stood against the wall beneath a framed sampler. The sampler read, in cross-stitch letters, the words WHEN THE WIND CHANGES, THE BOAT WILL LISTEN.

Evangeline opened a drawer of the desk and removed two objects. She set them on the surface with the care of a woman laying out surgical instruments.

"This," she said, and placed her hand on a brass key, "is for the east wing. The rooms there are dry, and the beds have been aired. You will be comfortable enough, if comfort is what you are after." Her mouth, when she said the word, made a small shape that was not quite a smile. "I do not imagine it is."

The key was heavy in Maren's palm when Evangeline pressed it into her hand. The metal was cold, and the bow of the key was shaped like a coiled fish, its eye a hollow circle through which Maren could see the pale skin of her own fingers.

"And this."

Evangeline lifted a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and held it out.

"Do not enter the rooms on this list. My sister did not permit it in her lifetime, and I do not permit it in her death. The doors are locked, but the locks are old, and you are, I suspect, the sort of person who finds a way around locks when she wishes to. So I am asking you, plainly, not to."

Maren took the paper. It was folded into a neat square and warm from the drawer.

"You are asking me," Maren said.

"I am telling you," Evangeline replied, "in the only form of address I find reliable at my age."

The wind moved against the side of the house, and somewhere a shutter tapped against clapboard, a rhythm like a slow pulse. Maren unfolded the paper. The handwriting was small and precise, the ink a deep brown that had bled slightly at the crossings of the t's and the l's. Five rooms were listed by name: the Sea Room, the Ink Room, the Bridal Chamber, the Map Room, and a fifth she did not recognize, the Narrowing.

"These are not all the rooms in the house," Maren said.

"No."

"They are not even, I expect, the most interesting."

Evangeline's eyes, which had been resting on a point somewhere beyond Maren's shoulder, shifted and settled on her face. They were a pale grey-blue, the color of the harbor under cloud, and they did not waver.

"You know what my sister wrote," Evangeline said. It was not a question. "You know it better than most. You have read it more than once, and you have read the parts of it that other people skip. You have an ear for the way she used a sentence, and you have catalogued her habits of language, and you believe, because you have been told this by people who should know better, that you understand her. So I will not pretend that the rooms on this list are not the most interesting rooms in the house. They are. They are the rooms in which she became the woman whose books you have read."

Maren folded the paper again, but she did not put it in her pocket. She held it in the hand that did not hold the key, the brass and the paper weighing her arms in opposite directions.

"And yet you are asking me to stay out of them."

"I am asking you to stay out of them until I decide that you may enter them. There is a difference. The first is a rule. The second is a negotiation, and I am too old to be bothered with rules I have not made myself."

From somewhere above them came a sound, a single creak of a floorboard, though the house had been, until that moment, perfectly still. Evangeline's chin lifted, and she listened for a moment longer than was comfortable, her head slightly tilted, the way a dog tilts toward a sound it cannot place. Then the creak did not repeat, and she relaxed by a degree so small that Maren might have imagined it.

"Upstairs," Evangeline said, and turned toward the staircase. "I will show you the east wing. Then I will leave you to it. I do not sleep well with strangers in the house, but I will manage. I always manage."

She climbed the stairs ahead of Maren, her hand on the banister but not gripping it, her feet finding the worn centers of the treads with the sureness of long practice. At the landing she paused, and Maren saw, set into the wall at eye level, a small framed photograph of a younger Evangeline standing beside a tall, thin woman with dark hair and a mouth that looked as though it had been drawn with a single line of ink. The tall woman had her arm around Evangeline's shoulders, and Evangeline was laughing, and the laughing girl in the picture was, Maren realized, almost unrecognizable as the woman who now stood beside her on the landing.

"My sister," Evangeline said, without looking at the photograph. "Theodora. Taken in the summer of nineteen sixty-three, on the rocks below the house. The water was warm that year. I remember because I was not, and I sat on a blanket and watched them swim."

She said the word them as though there were others in the photograph Maren could not see, and then she walked on down the corridor without explaining.

The east wing was reached through a narrow door at the end of the landing, the door painted the same color as the hallway walls so that, when closed, it disappeared. Beyond it the corridor was shorter, and the floorboards were new, the cut ends of the pine still pale and resinous, the smell of it sharp in the air. Three doors opened off this corridor, each with a small brass number tacked at eye level: 1, 2, 3.

"Number one is yours," Evangeline said. "It is the smallest, but it has the best view of the cove in the morning. Number two I use for storage, and the smell of camphor in there is, I am told, disagreeable. Number three has not been opened in some years, and I would prefer it stayed that way, though it is not on your list, because it is not one of hers."

She stopped at the door marked 1 and produced, from the pocket of her coat, a second key, smaller than the first and shaped like a simple oval.

"I keep this one," she said, and fitted it into the lock and turned it. "There is a lamp on the bedside table. The water in the pitcher is fresh, and there are clean towels in the cupboard. If you need anything, my room is at the other end of the house, and I will hear you if you call. I do not sleep, as I have said, but I do not mind being woken for a good reason."

The room was small, as promised, the ceiling low and sloped where the roof met the gable, the walls papered in a pattern of small blue flowers on a cream ground. A narrow bed stood against the wall, the iron frame painted white, the coverlet a quilted square of faded indigo. A window looked out over the cove, and through it Maren could see the darkening water and, on the far shore, the small lights of the village beginning to come on, one by one, like a string of low blue stars.

Evangeline stood in the doorway, her hands folded at her waist again, watching Maren take the room in.

"You will begin tomorrow," she said. "In the morning. There is a room downstairs, a study, where her papers are kept. I will unlock it for you at eight. I will unlock it for you at no other hour, and I will not leave you alone in it. You may take notes. You may photograph nothing. You may remove nothing from the house. These are my terms, and they are not negotiable, because I have nothing to gain by negotiation and you have everything."

"And what do I have to gain?" Maren said.

Evangeline looked at her for a long moment, the lamplight from the bedside table catching the silver at her temples, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening as she considered the question, or considered how much of the truth to spend on it.

"You have the chance," she said at last, "to find the woman who wrote those books, in the rooms where she wrote them, before I am no longer here to let you in. I am eighty-two, and the house is older than I am, and the two of us have not much time left together. So do not waste mine, and I will try not to waste yours."

She stepped back into the corridor, and the shadows settled around her like a coat she had been wearing for years.

"Breakfast is at seven," she said. "I take mine in the kitchen. I do not cook, but there is bread, and there is butter, and there is tea. If you require more than that, you have made a poor choice of houses."

She turned and walked back down the corridor, and Maren heard her footsteps on the new pine, then the sound of the narrow door closing, and then a silence so complete that the only proof she was still in the house at all was the faint, rhythmic creak of the floorboards above her, moving from one end of the landing to the other, the sound of a woman who could not sleep walking the length of her own grief.

Maren set her bag on the bed. She unfolded the paper Evangeline had given her, and read the list of rooms again. The Sea Room. The Ink Room. The Bridal Chamber. The Map Room. The Narrowing.

She folded it once more, and this time she slipped it into the pocket of her coat, and she stood at the window for a long time, watching the lights across the cove multiply in the dusk, and listening to the woman on the landing above her walk, and walk, and not come back.

Maren did not sleep well. The bed was soft enough, the linens were clean, and the room held a stillness that should have been restful, but she lay for hours listening to the house, to the boards that spoke back when she moved, to the wind off the cove that found the window frames and made them hum in a register just below thought. Somewhere above her, the old woman walked. Somewhere in the walls, something ticked, and Maren could not tell if it was a clock or a pipe or the bones of the place itself contracting in the cold.

She rose before six. The bread was where Evangeline had said it would be, on a slate slab on the kitchen table, a dense brown loaf with a heel crust that cracked when she cut it. The butter was in a stone crock, and the tea was in a tin painted with bluebells that had mostly rubbed away. Maren ate standing up, looking out a small window above the sink at a square of yard, a stone wall, and beyond it the dark line of the sea.

She did not see Evangeline, and she did not look for her.

The study was on the ground floor, behind a door she had not noticed the night before. It opened off a passage that ran from the front hall to the back of the house, a corridor so narrow her shoulders nearly touched the wallpaper on either side. The paper was a brownish green, paler at the top where a picture had hung, and darker where years of damp had crept up from the floor. The door was warped at the bottom and caught on a rug, and when she pushed it open, the room exhaled.

The smell was the first thing. Paper and dust and something faintly sweet, the ghost of a perfume, and beneath it the dry, mineral scent of old ink. The room was small, perhaps ten feet by twelve, and almost every surface was covered. A desk stood under the window, its leather top curled at the corners and scarred with ink rings. Shelves lined three walls, packed with books and with boxes and with loose sheaves of paper tied with ribbon that had faded to the color of weak tea. A single chair, upholstered in a green that had once been bright, sat in front of the desk. A second chair, wooden, was half-buried under a stack of magazines dated 1957.

On the desk, Maren found the boxes. Seventeen of them, all the same size, all the same make. Banker's boxes, the kind with the white string handles and the lift-off lids, their sides a mottled grey. They were arranged in a precise row, four across and four down, with a seventeenth box set apart at the end as if it did not quite belong with the others.

Each box had a label on its short end, handwritten in the same spidery hand she had seen on the manuscript cover in the bookshop. The labels read: Correspondence 1934-1947. Correspondence 1948-1962. Receipts. Press Cuttings Vol 1. Press Cuttings Vol 2. Press Cuttings Vol 3. Domestic Accounts. Contracts. Reviews. Personal. Photographs. And so on, sixteen boxes labeled with the same neat, slightly tilted penmanship, each one a small archive of a life.

The seventeenth box was different. It was not a banker's box. It was a manuscript box, leather, the kind used by authors to keep a working copy of a book, with a hinged lid and a clasp of tarnished brass. The leather was dark, almost black with age, and it was scuffed at the corners where hands had lifted it and set it down again and again. A label, smaller than the others and paler, had been glued to its spine. In the same spidery hand, the words: Book 1 - DO NOT PUBLISH.

Maren stood very still. The room was quiet, but the quiet had a quality now, a held breath, as if the house had been waiting for her to find this particular thing. She set down the mug of tea she had brought with her, and she set down the notebook she carried, and she laid her pen beside it, and she did not touch the box.

Not yet. She had work to do first.

She began with the desk. She cleared the surface, lifting each piece of paper, each notebook, each loose envelope, and setting it in a stack to one side. Beneath the papers she found a brass paperknife shaped like a feather, a blotter that had gone hard as pasteboard, and a small framed photograph that had been face-down. She turned it over. A young woman stood in a garden, holding a straw hat against the wind. She was looking past the camera at something out of frame, and her mouth was half open, as if she had been speaking when the shutter fell. Maren did not know who she was, but she set the photograph carefully on the shelf and made a note in her book to ask.

The desk had three drawers. The top drawer held a tin of paperclips, a rubber band that had perished into a single brittle ring, and a fountain pen with a cracked barrel. The middle drawer held a thimble, a button box, and a pair of small embroidery scissors. The bottom drawer held a single sheet of paper, folded once, and when Maren unfolded it she found a list in the same spidery hand, but written larger, with the pressure uneven, as if the hand that held the pen had not been steady. The list read:

The Sea Room
The Ink Room
The Bridal Chamber
The Map Room
The Narrowing

Beneath the list, in a different ink, as if added later, a single line: For M.

Maren folded the paper and put it in her pocket, beside the other list Evangeline had given her, and she sat down in the green chair. The springs creaked, and the cushion yielded under her in a way that suggested it remembered a different shape.

She worked methodically. She began with the first banker's box, Correspondence 1934-1947, and she lifted the lid, and the smell that came out was the smell of the whole house, concentrated: paper and dust and a faint, dry sweetness, like a flower pressed between pages and forgotten. The letters were tied in bundles, each bundle wrapped in a strip of newspaper. She lifted the first bundle and set it on the desk, and she untied the string, and she began to read.

The letters were from publishers. They began politely, in 1934, with a young woman named Evangeline Croft sending a manuscript to a firm in London, and receiving in return a printed rejection slip. Maren read the slips without expression, noting the dates and the firms, and she set them in a separate stack. The letters from 1935 were the same. The letters from 1936 were the same. Then, in the spring of 1937, a letter from a different firm, handwritten, on cream paper. Maren read it twice.

"Dear Miss Croft," it began. "We have read your manuscript with great interest, and while we are unable to offer you a contract at present, we wonder if you might consider some revisions. There is a book in this, we think, but it is hiding. If you would be willing to meet and discuss, we should be glad to make the journey to see you. Yours faithfully, H. Lamb."

Below the letter, in Evangeline's spidery hand, a single word: "No."

Maren turned the page. The next letter, six weeks later, was from the same firm, and it asked again, and below it was another single word, in the same ink: "No." And again. And again. Four letters that spring, and four refusals, and the fifth letter, in July, was a contract, and beneath it, in the same hand, the words: "I signed it because H. was kind. I did not believe it would be printed."

It was printed. Maren had seen the copy in the bookshop, the first of the eleven novels, the one with the woman on the cover. She lifted it from the shelf, and the dust came off in a soft puff, and the light from the window caught the gilt on the spine, and she held the book in one hand and the letter in the other, and the distance between the two was the distance of a life.

She worked for three hours. She read the first three bundles, made notes on the dates, the names, the significant moments. She found a telegram from 1942, a single sheet of yellow paper that had gone brown at the edges, and on it the words: "He is dead. Come home. E." She did not know who had sent it or who had died, and she made a note, and she set the telegram aside, and she kept working.

The house was quiet. The clock in the passage, which she had not heard before, began to strike nine, a thin, tentative sound, and then a tenth chime that did not quite land. Maren counted, and there were only nine, and then a long pause, and then a single tenth chime, as if the clock were correcting itself.

She drank her tea, which had gone cold, and she ate a piece of the bread she had brought with her, and she set the last bundle of the first box back in its place, and she lifted the lid onto Correspondence 1934-1947, and she pushed the box to one side.

The second box was Correspondence 1948-1962. She lifted the lid, and the same smell rose up, and she set the lid on the floor, and she was about to reach for the first bundle when she stopped.

The seventeenth box was looking at her.

It sat on the desk at the end of the row, slightly apart, and the label caught the light from the window. Book 1 - DO NOT PUBLISH. The leather was dark, and the brass clasp was tarnished to the color of old blood, and the spidery hand was unmistakable. She had seen it on the manuscript in the bookshop. She had seen it on the list in the drawer. She had seen it on every label in the room, and now it was here, on this box, with its warning, and she did not know what was inside.

She did not touch it. She made a note in her book, in the small, neat hand she used for her professional work, and the note read: "17th box. Leather. Label: Book 1 - DO NOT PUBLISH. Do not open without permission."

She underlined the last four words.

Then she went back to the second box, and she began to read the first bundle, and she did not look at the leather box again for a long time. But she was aware of it, the way one is aware of a door left open in a dark house, or a sound that has stopped without explanation, and the awareness sat at the edge of her work like a hand on her shoulder, and it did not let go.

At ten o'clock, she heard footsteps in the passage. Slow, careful, the sound of a woman who had learned to walk on floors that spoke back. The footsteps stopped outside the study door, and there was a tap, and Maren said, "Come in," and Evangeline stood in the doorway.

She had not changed her clothes from the night before, or perhaps she had changed and put on the same kind of clothes, a grey cardigan over a darker grey dress, and her hair was pinned up, and she looked as if she had not slept either.

"You are working," she said. It was not a question.

"I am beginning," Maren said. "I have catalogued the desk. I have started on the first box."

Evangeline's eyes moved past her to the row of boxes, and then to the leather box at the end, and then back to Maren. Her face did not change, but her hand tightened on the doorframe, and Maren saw the knuckles whiten.

"You have not opened that one," she said.

"I have not."

"Good." Evangeline's voice was very even. "That one is not for the catalogue. That one is for me."

Maren nodded, and made a note in her book, and Evangeline watched her write, and then she said, "I have put clean towels in the bathroom. There is hot water if you let the tap run for a minute. I take my lunch at one, in the kitchen. If you are hungry before then, there are apples in the bowl on the sideboard."

She did not wait for an answer. She turned, and her footsteps went back down the passage, and the floorboards spoke under her, and then she was gone.

Maren sat for a moment with her pen over the page. She had written: "17th box - owner's instruction: not for catalogue. Do not open." She read it twice, and then she drew a single line through the sentence, and beneath it she wrote: "17th box - leather, manuscript box. Label: Book 1 - DO NOT PUBLISH. Contents unknown. Access restricted by owner. Note: owner became visibly distressed on observing the box. Further inquiry required."

She closed the notebook, and she went back to the second box, and she lifted the first bundle, and she untied the string, and the smell of old paper rose up around her like a tide, and she began to read.