“I told you.” Madeline hugged herself.
Once Alice’s breath slowed, she pulled the candelabrum from the shelf.
“Stop that!” Madeline said. When Alice tugged the door back open, she begged again, “Please, Alice, don’t.”
“I refuse to be afraid.” Adrenaline coursed through Alice. When she stepped back inside, the now green book sat on the floor as quietly as any closed book. She lifted it and brought it out into the main library, where Madeline had traversed the room, standing as far from the hidden door as she could. Alice shook the stubborn green book. “We need to find out what it means that it changed color.”
“Why? If their love has changed in some way, we can’t change it back.”
“Maybe not,” Alice said, “but that’s like saying if someone is sick with an incurable disease, we shouldn’t try to understand what’s wrong with them.”
“I’d rather be living in ignorant bliss.”
“That’s not fair to the people you’d leave behind.”
“Haven’t you learned by now that there’s no one? I wouldn’t be leaving anyone behind.”
“You’d be leaving me behind,” Alice said with emotion in her voice that surprised her.
Alice moved away from the shelf and found her phone on the table. Madeline watched her from across the room as she typed, tapping the screen a few times before she read, “The Hollywood Reporterjust announced, ‘Longtime writing partners and spouses Emmalee and Vincent Brown are divorcing. Emmalee is returning to her maiden name, Weiner, and is starting her own production company as a solo writer.When the talent in a partnership is imbalanced, it inevitably leads to jealousy and irreconcilable differences. The same is true of a marriage,Weiner explained about her decision to leave her husband.’Yikes.” For some reason, Alice couldn’t help but chuckle.
“You find this is funny? They were so in love. To see it come to this, there isn’t a thing funny about it.”
“I know.” Alice fell silent. She didn’t consider Madeline responsible for the end of their relationship. Still, there was no denying that the relationship was over, that this was an example of a love story that ultimately failed.
“Why green?” Alice asked.
“What?” Madeline glared at her like she had asked a very obvious question.
“Why do you think the book turned green? Why not yellow or blue or—” Alice could not bring herself to utterpurple. “Or orange even? Why aren’t there any orange books or white or pink? You don’t think it’s strange?”
“Alice, have you not noticed that everything in my house is strange? I like it that way.”
Since she first arrived, Alice had been questioning the uncanny ways of the house, wondering how everything worked, suspecting secret mechanisms she couldn’t see, possibly even magic. It had not occurred to her that the house responded to Madeline. That it was strange because its matriarch was strange. That it could not be any other way. These were questions for another time, distractions from the root of what she had to prove to Madeline.
“The green must mean something,” Alice insisted.
“It hardly matters. If it’s green, brown, if it ignited in flames. Their love is gone.”
Alice’s eyes widened. “You think a book could do that, spontaneously combust?” She wondered what that would do to the love inside.
“A book can do anything.”
At last they were in agreement.
Madeline snatched the green book from Alice. “These are not your stories to peruse however you’d like.” She disappeared briefly into the secret library, returning with the gold ledger. “Did you break into my safe?”
Alice couldn’t tell if the prospect infuriated or impressed her. She wanted to say yes, just to see how Madeline would respond, but Alice was done lying.
“You left it out.”
Madeline sat down by the fire and flipped through the pages. “I remember when Gregory bought this for me. I was so proud of my stories, all those people I was helping. As I entered each name, each completed story, I thought I was committing them to the eternity of the page. Now I look at this and it’s a different kind of record.”
Alice stood beside her and leaned down, looking at all those names neatly scribed into the book beside the first line of the story. Like Alice’s tales, Madeline’s books did not have titles.
Alice motioned to the ledger. “May I?”
To her surprise, Madeline consented, relinquishing it like a pliant student. Alice slipped into the chair beside Madeline’s and paged through the large gold book.
