22. Epilogue One Year Later
Epilogue: One Year Later
Lilly
The new wing smells like fresh paint and polished wood and underneath both of those, old paper.
It always smells like old paper.
I stand in the central aisle on the morning of the dedication ceremony. I think that this is the smell of my whole life. It's not the paint, not the wood, but the paper underneath. The documents. The permanence of things written down.
The expansion doubled the wing's capacity.
Two new climate-controlled rooms are for the most fragile materials. A reading room with proper researcher stations takes the place of the folding table we made do with for the first six months.
The most exciting addition is the digitization lab. Hamish spends most of his time there now. He is building the online catalog that will make the Harrison collection accessible to researchers who will never set foot in this compound.
Last month we received our first international inquiry.
A professor from London is writing a paper on the historical governance of paranormal clans in North America. He filed a request to use the 1923 ruling. He plans on presenting a research paper at the Edinburgh Clans Archive.
I sent him the archival-quality scan, in addition to the full chain of custody documentation with a full citation guide. I built this intentionally for researchers working with paranormal primary sources.
He wrote back to say it was the most thorough citation package he had ever received.
I filed his email under correspondence, academic, international.
Bex is at the far end of the wing, arguing with Hamish about notation.
This is their natural state. I have come to understand it as a form of professional affection. They disagree precisely because they both care about the same thing. They care with equal intensity, and the disagreement is how they make the work better.
Bex has been right four times this month. Hamish has been right three times. Neither of them is keeping score because they are both pretending they are not keeping score.
Students from the university filter in for the early-access viewing hour. A few of the graduate students I have been working with on their thesis research are wide-eyed at a new room they haven't had access to yet.
Two undergraduates who came for the rare manuscript display are currently standing in front of the 1899 Harrison elder letter. They have expressions I recognize.
It is caused by that unique experience of a person who has just touched something very old. It's very real. In that moment, the distance between themselves, their point in time, and a point in history collapses.
It is why I do this work.
Grady comes to stand beside me.
He was in meetings all morning. There is so much clan business. The Veron arbitration preparation, the ratification of censure against Denholm Scott and Aldric Veron. Then a follow-up from the council on the governance charter amendment Petra Calloway proposed after the session.
Grady carries Alpha, New Projects Vice President, council member with the same easy pace. The importance of each has shifted since the transition. There is a gravity to him now that was not there a year ago.
He has finally, fully, let go.
I feel it in the bond before I see it in his face.
"International inquiry," he says.
"London. A professor writing on paranormal governance history."
"Bex told me." He is quiet for a moment, looking at the new windows. The fancy shelves, the students, the brighter light shining on the past and present.
"You built this." He wraps his arm around my shoulders.
"We built this." I glance up at him. "Don't make me get out the contract with the university."
The corner of his mouth moves.
There is a brief dedication ceremony. Attendees include several professors, university administrators, and clan members. A representative from the county historical society shakes my hand. She and I are corresponding about a joint digitization project.
When it is done, Grady and I walk back through the wing together.
Bex is still at the far end. Now she explains something to one of the graduate students. The focused enthusiasm she brings to any explanation that involves documents older than 1900.
Hamish is in the digitization lab playing with the new equipment.
The blue light of his monitors is visible through the glass door.
Lisa is at the worktable with Ransom, going through a box of construction records with the filing guide open in front of them.
Lisa is pointing and Ransom wears the focused expression of a man who has decided that correct documentation is a personal value and is choosing to demonstrate it.
Ransom has been here every week for four months. He has not once mislabeled anything.
I gave him a commendation in the collection's volunteer log. He received it with extreme dignity and then kept a copy of it framed in his office at the council building.
Grady stops at the framed institutional agreement on the south wall. He reads it. His name is on it, as donor representative. Mine is on it, as lead archivist. The Hansen Clan and the university, side by side in the kind of formal language that makes something real.
"I was thinking," he says, "about the east wing records room."
"What about it?"
"The pre-1900 land records are in three different locations right now. The compound, the archive, and the county historical society. Consolidation would make the Veron documentation stronger."
"The county historical society won't transfer originals." I consider it. "But they'll loan for digitization. If I submit the request by the end of the month I can have the digital records integrated into the finding aid by spring."
"I can make a formal request to the society's director."
"Don't. I have a relationship with their acquisitions chair. It'll move faster through me." I look at him. "What you can do is write a letter of support from the clan. Two paragraphs. I'll send you the template."
He looks at me.
"You already wrote the template," he says.
"I wrote it last week."
"Of course you did."
His face warms in a way that belongs to me alone and that I intend to keep for a very long time. He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair back from my face, and the gesture is so easy, so absent of performance or deliberateness, that it catches in my chest like it always does.
Not the bond, this time.
Just him.
Just this.
"Are you ready for tomorrow?" I ask. The first anniversary of our fated pairing. Bex has made it ceremonial, because Bex makes everything ceremonial if she has enough notice, and this time I did not stop her.
"I've been ready since the day I walked through your archive door," he says.
"You walked through my archive door looking for my sister."
"And found the only thing I've been looking for since I was in my early thirties." He says it easily, without drama, the way he says things that are simply true. "I was just looking in the wrong place."
I lean into him.
His arm comes around me.
Through the windows of the archive wing, the afternoon light is catching the dust motes above the shelves, making the old paper glow, turning the whole space into something that looks, briefly, like it belongs to a different century.
Like the documents and the people and the years all exist at once, layered, the way history actually is.
The way I have always understood it.
Three hundred years of clan history, organized on these shelves in the system I built.
One year of ours, just beginning.
I go back to the finding aid.
There is always more to document.
THE END