She called on a Wednesday evening, which was not what he had been expecting.
He had asked if they could speak - the email sent before he could revise it, the threshold crossed. He had been expecting a reply in text, the medium they had established, the careful written exchange that suited both of them. He had been composing his end of the conversation in his head for three days, finding the words for things that had been present without words since the monastery, arranging them with the precision that text permitted.
His phone rang at seven-fifteen and the screen said Mara Leclerc and he understood that voice was a different medium from text and that all the arranging he had done was preparation for a different conversation than the one he was about to have.
He answered.
Her voice was lower than he had imagined, which was not something he had been aware of imagining. Her English was nearly perfect - the precision of someone who had learned it as an adult and had spent twenty years refining it in professional contexts, with an accent that was French underneath and something else underneath that, possibly the specific inflection of someone who had been speaking Italian in daily life for many years. She said his name once at the beginning, the way you say someone's name when you have been writing to them for months and are now hearing your own voice say it for the first time.
He said her name back, which felt like completing something.
She asked about the monastery. Not what it was like - she had read his email about that - but what it had done. The distinction was precise in the way her distinctions were always precise, and he found himself grateful for it because it was the right question and he had been waiting for someone to ask the right question.
He told her. Not in the arranged form he had been composing for three days - in the form that the voice produced, which was less organized and more honest. The bell. The loosening. The Sunday Mass and what had happened and what had not happened. The document dated 1291 and what it meant to understand that the address had been waiting for him across seven centuries. Brother Francis saying certainty is not what's needed.
She listened without interrupting, which he recognized as the voice equivalent of what her emails did - attending fully, reserving response until the thing was complete.
When he finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said: I know what the document addressed to the historian is.
He sat down. He had been standing at the kitchen window, the July evening doing what July evenings did in Alton, the light going slowly in the way summer light went. He sat at the kitchen table and said: tell me.
She had found a reference to it, she said, in the Barcelona collection - the same collection where she had found the notation reference that had led her to Teodor. A catalog entry from 1847, describing a set of documents received from a private collection in southern France, including one item described as: a formal instrument of address, in the custody notation, directed to a future keeper identified by occupation rather than name. The occupation given was: historian of ideas.
She had not known what to make of it when she found it. The catalog entry was incomplete - the document itself was not in the Barcelona collection, had apparently been separated from the other materials at some point between 1847 and the collection's transfer to Rome. She had been looking for it for two years.
She believed it was in the Alton library.
She had believed this since March of 2024, when Teodor had told her, in one of their last emails, that the library contained materials he had not fully catalogued, that there were things on the shelves whose full significance he had not traced, that he had organized the library as a map and that some of the territories on the map were still marked unknown.
She had not told Joshua this in the emails. She had been waiting until she could say it in a way that allowed for the conversation that would follow, and the conversation required voice.
Joshua looked at the library doorway from the kitchen table. The familiar shelves, the organized spines, the map of the thing.
He said: I haven't found it yet.
She said: I know. I think it's in the section you haven't fully decoded. The section Daniel is still working on. I think when he gets there you'll find it.
He said: what does it say.
She said: I don't know. I only have the catalog description. But I know it exists and I know it was addressed to you and I have been waiting since March of last year to tell you.
They talked for two hours. Not only about the document - about the record, about what she had found in the Barcelona collection in the three years before Teodor's first email, about the specific quality of the work of following the notation system through six archives in four countries without knowing what it was leading to. She had known, she said, that it was leading somewhere. She had not known where. The email from an eighty-three-year-old man in Alton, Illinois, arriving in February of 2023, had been the answer to a question she had been asking for three years without knowing the shape of the answer.
He asked about Umbria. The monastery she had mentioned in her email.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: I went because I was not sure I believed what I was finding in the archives. I had been following the notation for eighteen months and the picture it was forming was larger than I had expected and I needed to be somewhere that wasn't the archive for a while. A friend suggested the monastery. I went for a week.
She paused. He waited.
She said: I came back believing what I was finding. Not because anything happened at the monastery that I could point to. Just because the week happened and at the end of it I was different. You know what I mean.
He said yes. He knew what she meant.
The call ended at nine-twenty. He sat at the kitchen table for a while after, the phone on the table in front of him, the July dark fully arrived outside the window. The document was in the library. Or it was in the undecoded section and would surface when Daniel reached it. Either way it was here, in this house, had been here since before he arrived, had been waiting with the patience of things that do not need to be pursued.
He thought about Mara's voice. The precision of it, and underneath the precision something warmer than the emails had been able to carry, some quality that text filtered out and voice did not. He had been corresponding with a careful scholar. He had just spent two hours talking to a person, which was not the same thing, and the difference was significant in ways he had not finished understanding.
He opened the laptop.
There was an email from Aldric Renner, sent that afternoon.
He read it. It was collegial, warm, specific - Aldric had been thinking about the notation system, had made some progress on one of the manuscripts they had discussed in Clayton, had a question about a dating issue he thought Joshua might be able to help with. The email was entirely professional, entirely plausible, and addressed to the version of Joshua that the coffee shop in Clayton had known - the historian considering a fascinating historical phenomenon from a comfortable distance.
He read it twice.
He did not reply. He closed the laptop and went to the library and stood in front of the shelves for a long time, looking at the section Daniel had not yet reached.
The document was here. He could feel it the way you feel something you cannot see but know to be present.
He went to bed. He did not reply to Aldric that night, or the next morning, or the morning after that.