Alone in the Fox Library’s kitchen, Drummond Fox eats “shadow ice cream” and drinks tea, briefly savoring the comfort of being back in his long-abandoned home. The unchanged food reminds him how the shadow-hidden house preserves everything, even as he struggles with fear and grief from the massacre that drove him away ten years earlier.

In his tower, Drummond opens cupboard six and examines a long-mysterious special book whose front page has always been blank for Fox Library members. Checking the library register, Drummond confirms the book was acquired in 1918 from excavations at Aswan, Egypt, and has never officially left the collection. Yet the volume is identical to the Book of Doors Cassie showed him in Lyon, convincing Drummond that the Fox Library already possesses the Book of Doors.

Drummond reasons that only time travel can explain two versions existing at once: Cassie’s copy, with readable instructions on its front page, must be a later version in the book’s own timeline, while the cupboard-six copy is “younger.” This implies the Book of Doors will someday be taken from the Fox Library and end up in Cassie’s hands in New York in the past—an unknown chain of events that alarms Drummond and raises urgent questions of how, when, and why.

Although Drummond had once intended to take the Book of Doors from Cassie for safekeeping, he now decides he must stay with Cassie until he understands how she got it. He admits to himself that loneliness and the rare happiness he felt with Cassie and Izzy have influenced him, even as he remains terrified of the unnamed woman who killed his friends and what she might do if she accessed the library’s books.

Remembering happier nights before the tragedy, Drummond recalls a discussion with his friends Wagner, Lily, and Yasmin about categorizing special books and the possibility of time travel. Wagner argues for a “closed model,” where the past cannot be changed because any actions taken in the past were always part of history, while the others speculate about a Book of Time and the dangers of such power. The memory turns darker as they mention the Popovs in St. Petersburg (linked to the Book of Despair) possibly going missing, and Drummond shares rumors of a woman trying to collect all the books—leaving him, back in the present, staring into the night and searching for a plan.