Page 226 - The Midnight Library

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ere were inevitably shaky moments. She felt the familiar feeling of

being in a play for which she didn’t know the lines.
‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked Ash one night.
‘It’s just . . .’ He looked at her with his kind smile and intense, scrutinising
eyes. ‘I don’t know. You forgot our anniversar y was coming up. You think

you haven’t seen films you’ve seen. And vice versa. You forgot you had a
bike. You forget where the plates are. You’ve been wearing my slippers. You
get into my side of the bed.’
‘Jeez, Ash,’ she said, a little bit too tense. ‘It’s like being interrogated by the

three bears.’
‘I just worr y . . .’
‘I’m fine. Just, you know, lost in research world. Lost in the woods.
oreau’s woods.’

And she felt in those moments that maybe she’d return to the Midnight
Librar y. Sometimes she remembered the words of Mrs Elm on her first visit
there. If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry . . .
e moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then ever ything that
exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a

dream. A memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all.
Which begged the question: if this was the perfect life, why hadn’t she
forgotten the librar y?

How long did it take to forget?
Occasionally she felt wisps of gentle depression float around her, for no
real reason, but it wasn’t comparable to how terrible she had felt in her root
life, or indeed many of her other lives. It was like comparing a bit of a sniffle
to pneumonia. When she thought about how bad she had felt the day she

lost her job at String eor y, of the despair, of the lonely and desperate
yearning to not exist, then this was nowhere near.
Ever y day she went to bed thinking she was going to wake up in this life

again, because it was – on balance, and all things considered – the best she
had known. Indeed, she progressed from going to bed casually assuming
she’d stay in this life, to being scared to fall asleep in case she wouldn’t.
And yet, night aer night she would fall asleep and day aer day she
would wake up in the same bed. Or occasionally on the carpet , but she