All the Worlds Between

She ran her fingers along the remaining spines the way she had as a child, reading titles by touch. Half the shelves were bare. Cardboard boxes sat open on the floor between the stacks — Austen slumped against an atlas as though the two had given up together. The overhead lights were off. No one had bothered. Late October sun came through the high windows and did what it could.

She had not set foot in Starthollow in thirty-five years. That had not been an accident. There had been invitations — her father's retirement party, the library's centennial, Christmas after Christmas — and she had found reasons for every one.

Pale rectangles marked where shelves had stood, the walls remembering what the room had already forgotten. She stopped in front of one and placed her palm flat against the plaster. Cool. Faintly gritty. A shelf had been here for forty years, and now there was only this clean bright shape on a yellowed wall.

Her father's hand on these same shelves, when the shelves were here. The quiet way he'd push a book back into alignment, as if straightening a child's collar before church.

She let her hand fall from the plaster. Walked deeper into the building. The children's section was mostly intact — perhaps they'd left it for last, or perhaps no one had the heart. Low shelves with rounded edges. A reading rug patterned with the map of an imaginary kingdom, its colors faded to suggestion. She recognized it the way you recognize a face in a crowd before you can name it: she had spent whole afternoons on that rug, cross-legged, a book open across her knees wider than her lap could properly hold.

Her arms remembered before she did. She picked a book from the nearest shelf — some middle-grade fantasy with a cracked spine and a dragon on the cover — and held it against her chest. She stood there a moment. Then she put it back, carefully, spine out, aligned with its neighbors. Old habits.

In the main reading room, the long tables had been pushed to one side and the chairs stacked. A bulletin board by the door still held a flyer for a summer reading program that had ended in August: Starthollow Public Library Presents: Worlds Beyond! Beneath it, in smaller type, a list of recommended authors. Her name was third from the top.

She looked away.

Along the far wall, a glass-fronted case still held its display: local authors, local history. She could see her own books in there — every edition the library had acquired over thirty years, arranged in a neat row that told her life in spines. Someone had made a label in careful handwriting: Starthollow's Own — Elspeth Hale. She did not know whether this made her proud or sad. She suspected it was something older than either.

The corridor to the back offices was dim and narrower than she remembered — or perhaps she'd been smaller when she last walked it, small enough that it felt wide. The linoleum was a shade of green that belonged to another decade. Her shoes were louder here, each step crisp and singular.

His door was closed. Not locked — Mrs. Calloway had said they'd been waiting for her. She rested her hand on the handle. The metal was cold and slightly loose, the way it had always been. Her father had never fixed it. He'd said the wobble gave it character.

She had called him every Sunday, without fail. It was the only promise she had kept.

A girl sitting cross-legged by his desk, reading aloud to him while he worked, stumbling over words she'd later build worlds from. The scratch of his pen. He'd pretended to do paperwork, but he was writing down every word she said.

She turned the handle and pushed the door open. The room exhaled — dust and old paper and something underneath that she could not name, except that it was his. The desk sat beneath the window, solid and dark and entirely unchanged, as if it had been waiting, too.

Elspeth pulled out the chair and sat down.

The room was smaller than she remembered. A filing cabinet stood against one wall, its top drawer slightly ajar. A coat rack held nothing. On the wall behind the desk, a calendar — the library's own, illustrated with local woodcuts — was still open to March.

She didn't touch the calendar. She opened the top drawer of the desk instead.

Pens, rubber bands, a pair of reading glasses with one arm mended with tape — she set the glasses aside. She worked through the rest with the efficiency of someone who had done this before: her mother's sewing room, years ago, the same blunt arithmetic of what to keep and what to let go. The pens went into the bin bag Mrs. Calloway had left by the door. The rubber bands followed. She kept the glasses.

The second drawer held files: acquisitions records, cataloguing logs, correspondence with publishers about damaged shipments. The paper life of a small-town librarian. She lifted the stack out whole and set it on the floor. Beneath the files, pushed to the back of the drawer, was a tin.

A shortbread tin — the kind with a painted Highland scene on the lid. Hills, a loch, a sky rubbed almost to bare metal where someone had run a thumb across it over many years. She picked it up. It was lighter than she expected.

Inside: a photograph of a girl with dark braids standing outside this building, squinting in the sun. A child's library card — Elspeth Hale, age 6 — laminated and faintly sticky with age. And beneath these, a single sheet of paper, lined, wide-ruled, the kind made for children learning to write. Folded twice. The handwriting on it was not hers.

Her hands stopped on the fold.

She knew his hand before she finished unfolding it. The even, careful script of a man who had spent his life labelling spines and writing call numbers on index cards. He had written a title at the top: Elspeth's Story, age 5, told at bedtime. And below it, in the same steady hand, her own words — words she had spoken once, to him, in the dark, long before she ever wrote a sentence anyone else would read:

The princess was not afraid of the dragon because she knew a secret. Dragons are only angry because no one asks them what they want.

That was all. The page was half-empty below those two lines.

He had been ready for more.

The light through the window had gone amber. She sat with the paper in her lap, and let the room hold her.

⁂

Footsteps in the corridor. Then a voice — "Hello?" — the way you call into a place you expect to be empty.

She folded the paper and set it on the desk. Stood. Smoothed her jacket with both hands, a gesture she realized, a beat too late, was her mother's.

He was standing in the main room near the stacked chairs, a thermos under one arm. Grey-haired. Broader than the boy in her memory. Flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearms, paint on one cuff. His face held the bones of the boy she'd known, weathered and rearranged by thirty-five years she had not been here to see.

"Mrs. Calloway mentioned someone was coming for Martin's things," he said. "I didn't realize it would be today."

"I should have called," she said.

"Yes," he said. "You should have." He held her gaze a moment — and then something in it softened, not quite a smile but the ghost of one. "Hello, Elspeth."

"Hello, Graham."

He looked away first. "I brought coffee. Figured someone might be here."

He unscrewed the thermos cap and poured, then produced a second mug from his coat pocket. He filled it and held it out. He hadn't asked how she took it. He hadn't needed to.

She took the mug. The coffee was strong and slightly too hot and she wrapped both hands around it and held on.

They talked for a while — the council vote, the timeline. He told her the building would become a community center. She said that sounded all right. He said nothing to that. He asked after her work. She asked after his. He painted houses now, taught art at the secondary school two towns over. Had a daughter. A granddaughter.

"He came to my shows, you know," Graham said. "Your father." He looked into his thermos cap. "Always said you'd like the sea ones."

She opened her mouth and closed it. Something pressed hot behind her eyes. She looked down at the coffee burning in her hands.

He seemed like a man who had built a life he was not unhappy with. She found this harder to sit with than bitterness would have been.

He glanced at the display case along the far wall. "I read every one," he said. Quiet. Not looking at her. He opened his mouth as if to say something else, then closed it. "Every one."

The coffee in her mug had stopped steaming. She stared into it, and a long silence passed between them that was not quite uncomfortable and not quite anything else.

The building ticked. Somewhere a pipe settled. She could hear the parking lot lights humming on outside, which meant the afternoon was over.

"Do you remember," she said, "that summer we read Gilderfell on the roof? The whole series. You read the knight's chapters and I read the sorceress."

"I remember." He turned the thermos cap slowly in his hands. "That was never really the problem, though, was it."

"No," she said. "No, it wasn't."

"There's something I want to show you," she said.

She led him down the corridor to the back office, to the desk and the open drawer. The paper was where she'd left it. She picked it up and held it out.

"My father wrote this down. I told it to him when I was five. A bedtime story."

He took it carefully, the way you handle something that has survived a long time. He read it — it didn't take long — and when he looked up, something had shifted in his face. Not tears. Something quieter.

"That sounds like you," he said, and cleared his throat. "Even then."

She laughed — a short, startled sound that surprised them both. She pressed her fingers to her mouth, and for a moment neither of them spoke, and the room held the strangeness of being known by someone she had not seen in decades — known as the child who believed you could reason with dragons.

"You should have it," she said. "I'd like you to."

He looked at the paper. She watched him turn it over once, carefully, and then fold it back along the same creases. He held it out to her.

"It's yours, Elspeth." His voice was gentle and firm and something else she couldn't name. "I'm not the one who needs it."

She took the paper back. For a moment her hand rested near his — not touching, just close — and then she slid the page into the tin and closed the lid.

⁂

They walked back through the library together, past the stacked boxes and the bare shelves and the pale shapes on the walls where things had been. At the front door he held it open for her. The evening air came in, carrying cut grass and the first edge of autumn.

"It was good to see you, Elspeth."

"You too, Graham."

He touched her arm — briefly, just above the elbow — and let go.

She stepped through the door and did not look back, though her body wanted to.

She sat in the car for a while before starting the engine. His truck was the only other vehicle in the lot, parked under a light that had just come on.

She set the tin on the passenger seat. Rested her hand on the lid — the hills, the loch, the sky worn through to metal — and then let go.

Inside: a photograph, a library card, and two sentences in her father's hand about a princess who was not afraid.

She started the car.

The road out of Starthollow climbed through the same hills it always had, and the light was going gold and low through the trees, and the tin sat on the seat beside her, catching the last of it.