Summary

In April 2001, Aaron “grimly” works on the final documents, like a gambler spinning the roulette wheel, he’d come to reply on the eternal promise of the next round of letters” (413). He accepts they will bring “no grand revelation, no smoking gun, no hidden three-century-old wisdom to galvanize his drifting life … Ester Velasquez was not going to pop out from behind the curtains and save him from himself” (413). “He should have known all along, a historian’s only true charge” is to listen (413). Now Aaron tries to listen to Ester’s words, “rather than what he wanted her to say” (414).

Librarian Patricia hands him the second-to-last document, a letter from HaCoen Mendes to Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca: “the angels who escort the sun on its passage across the sky do not slow to lengthen my final days, nor do I ask this” (414). The...