hey left the book on the shelf in the back room, the same shelf where Elias had first found it, and they walked out of The Parchment Curl and into the bright afternoon light of Crooked Lane, and the street looked different to them now, the way familiar streets always look different when you have been away and come back changed. The old buildings seemed newer, the cracks in the sidewalk seemed less like flaws and more like patterns, and the people who walked past them—a mother with a stroller, a teenager with headphones,
