Page 233 - The Midnight Library

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ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet , you

could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.
And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it,
the thing that had le her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love. Even
her brother hadn’t wanted her in that life. ere had been no one, once Volts

had died. She had loved no one, and no one had loved her back. She had
been empty, her life had been empty, walking around, faking some kind of
human normality like a sentient mannequin of despair. Just the bare bones
of getting through.

Yet there, right there in that garden in Cambridge, under that dull grey
sky, she felt the power of it, the terrifying power of caring deeply and being
cared for deeply. Okay, her parents were still dead in this life but here there
was Molly, there was Ash, there was Joe. ere was a net of love to break her

fall.
And yet she sensed deep down that it would all come to an end, soon. She
sensed that, for all the perfection here, there was somet hing wrong amid the
rightness. And the thing that was wrong couldn’t be fixed because the flaw

was the rightness itself. Ever ything was right, and yet she hadn’t earned this.
She had joined the movie halfway. She had taken the book from the librar y,
but truthfully, she didn’t own it. She was watching her life as if from behind
a window. She was, she began to feel, a fraud. She wanted this to be her life.

As in her real life. And it wasn’t and she just wished she could forget that
fact. She really did.
‘Mummy, are you cr ying?’
‘No, Molly, no. I’m fine. Mummy’s fine.’

‘You look like you are cr ying.’
‘Let’s just get you cleaned up . . .’

Later that same day, Molly pieced together a jigsaw of jungle animals, Nora
sat on the sofa stroking Plato as his warm, weighty head rested on her lap.

She stared at the ornate chess set that was sitting there on the mahogany
chest.
A thought rose slowly, and she dismissed it. But then it rose again.
As soon as Ash came home, she told him she wanted to see an old friend
from Bedford and wouldn’t be back for a few hours.