Rain reached the municipal library before Tessa brought the first box inside.
A hole above the upper shelves had let water travel down the wall and into a row of local records. Volunteers stood on either side of a narrow aisle, passing books and folded papers toward the dry front room. Somebody had stretched a tarpaulin beneath the leak. It sagged with collected water, too heavy to leave above the people working under it.
Tessa set the recovered records on a table and went for another bucket.
The building was meant to become an archive. For that morning, it needed to become a place where paper could survive the next hour. She could not save a history by announcing a mission for it while the roof soaked the source.
A volunteer asked whether they should discard the wet pages already stuck together. Tessa looked at the ink bleeding along one edge.
“Keep them separate from the dry box. Don’t force them open. Ask the conservator when she arrives.”
“She might not come until tomorrow.”
“Then mark the condition and keep what we have.”
