The Cartographers(10)

Her father was going to be thrilled.

It might even be the first step toward finally breaking through his armor. To someday becoming what she’d always dreamed they could be. The two esteemed Drs. Young together, working side by side, curating the world’s most priceless maps, in one of the world’s most respected institutions.

She was up the stairs and sprinting toward the Map Division offices before she could think. Everyone was coming back from lunch, and she managed to show a handful of senior researchers what she’d found on the way, including Swann, who was so excited he hugged her. She thought she’d never reach her father’s office for all the interested calls from offices she’d had to duck into to show her findings, but at last, she sat bouncing impatiently in one of his guest chairs, waiting for him to return. The accolades this would bring her! She could hardly contain her excitement at imagining how surprised—and maybe even how proud?—he would be.

At last, Nell heard his heavy, purposeful footsteps. She was on him nearly before he could even open the door.

“Dad!” she’d shouted. “I was down in the basement, and I found this box—it’s got a perfectly preserved partial collection of rare eighteenth-century American maps—you have to see this!”

She described her findings at blinding speed, rattling off early guesses as to their provenance, her ideas for how they could fit into the library collection, and how to go about finding the donors to give them proper credit.

“And what about this gas station highway map?” she’d also asked, holding it up. She begged him for permission to examine it in greater detail. Obviously, it was worthless compared to the other specimens, but perhaps it had something to do with a route to where even more valuable maps could be located? It was nothing short of the greatest adventure a cartographer could ask for.

But to her surprise, her father had the exact opposite reaction to what she’d been expecting.

“Why were you wasting your time in the uncatalogued archives?” he asked.

She tried to explain how much extra time she had as an intern, that she hadn’t been shirking her duties, but rather giving more. Her father didn’t seem convinced. He took the box, glanced through the maps—and then tossed the bundle dismissively back in.

“Nell. These are not authentic.”

The words struck her like lightning.

“Not a single one.”

“How—”

He tilted the box slightly, caught sight of the word junk scrawled on the side, and smirked, as though it was evidence in his favor.

“Come on, the donor could have just reused a box. Why would someone purposefully donate junk to the NYPL?” Nell said, frantic, but he just shook his head. It only made her angrier.

“Plenty of reasons. Fame. Money. Attention from a scandal.”

“But these are—”

“Enough,” he said, with a coldness that startled her. “They’re nothing more than cheap reproductions. Not worthy of the library’s time.”

She was stunned to silence. Her father was renowned for his expertise, his abilities incomparable, but still. The speed with which he’d rejected her discovery was shocking.

If she hadn’t already shown half the department what she’d found, she would have just run out of his office, sobbed in the bathroom, and never brought it up again. But this time, she couldn’t just accept his assessment lying down. Nothing would be more humiliating than to have to crawl back to everyone, especially Swann, especially just after he’d all but promised her a position at the NYPL, and admit she’d been nothing but an overeager intern who didn’t know what she was doing. She did know what she was doing! She was sure the maps were authentic. This was her professional reputation on the line, and she would not let her father bulldoze her the way he did everyone else.

The ensuing argument was the worst they’d ever had. And what happened after . . .

The elder Dr. Young was well known for his temper when he didn’t get his way with a certain project or his portion of the research budget, but she’d never experienced the full brunt of his anger until that day. Their debate escalated to a shouting match, but Nell refused to back down. In the end, she didn’t even know what they were screaming about.

But she would never forget what happened next.

There was a whole crowd watching them by then. Swann and several other researchers were crammed into the office, trying to defuse the situation—and one more.

As the chair of the NYPL herself, steely, regal Irene Pérez Montilla, came running into Dr. Young’s room, shouting that the library’s patrons could hear them in the main hall, her father snatched the box from the ground and demanded Nell’s immediate firing. Or else he—the Map Division’s most acclaimed scholar, the famous, invaluable Dr. Young—would quit.

Nell had argued. She had begged.

She had even cried, in front of everyone.

An hour later, she was standing at the corner of Fifth Avenue, holding another cardboard box—this one containing everything that had been at her desk.



Nell shook her head sharply, throwing off the reverie, and folded the map back up so she didn’t have to look at it.

She didn’t know what had happened to the rest of them, but out of everything that had been in that box, this map was the one in his portfolio. This was the single one he kept from that day.