The old Vancouver Public Library Central Branch still stood.
Everything else had shifted—fractured, reformed, rewritten—but the building remained, stubborn as memory itself.
People once joked it looked like a Colosseum. A place built for spectacle.
Now it held something quieter.
Fragments.
Archives.
Truths that had survived everything designed to erase them.
Ivy Mae didn’t intend to go that deep.
She had drifted into the Indigenous Studies section without thinking—past policy texts, past aging legislation, past shelves still labeled with institutional stubbornness:
Indian Act
The air felt different here.
Heavier.
Like the past hadn’t been archived so much as contained.
That’s when she saw it.
A handmade book.
Uncatalogued.
Out of place.
Almost deliberate in its refusal to belong.
She pulled it carefully from the shelf.
It resisted slightly, like it had been waiting.
The cover opened.
And the book rose.
A pop-up structure unfolded from its spine—paper branches lifting into space like something alive remembering how to grow.
A family tree.
Hand-drawn. Layered. Reinforced with fragments of photographs and handwritten notes.
Names lined each branch.
Some faded.
Some bold.
All intentional.
Ivy Mae leaned in.
Something about the faces unsettled her immediately.
Not recognition.
Not yet.
Something closer to memory without context.
She turned the page.
Another branch unfolded.
More names.
More fragments of lives held together by ink and care.
Margins filled with notes—small attempts to preserve what history might otherwise lose.
Then she stopped.
Everything in her went still.
Her hand tightened on the page.
Because there—anchored to one of the branches—was a photograph.
Older. Aged. Time-worn.
But unmistakable in a way that bypassed logic entirely.
Her breath caught.
“…no…”
It didn’t make sense.
And yet it did.
Her eyes moved down.
To the name written beneath it.
Once.
Then again.
“Roman.”
Her voice broke the silence of the archive.
“Jas—both of you. Come here.”
Footsteps approached, slowing as they sensed the shift in her posture, the stillness that meant something had already changed.
Roman arrived first. Jas just behind him.
Neither spoke.
They could feel it before they saw it.
Ivy Mae didn’t move.
Not yet.
She swallowed.
Carefully, almost gently, she spoke.
“Before you look…”
A pause.
“This is from Indigenous Studies.”
Her gaze flicked to the surrounding shelves.
“To the Sixties Scoop archive section. Right beside the Indian Act records.”
Silence settled deeper.
“I don’t know what this is yet,” she said quietly. “And I don’t want to assume anything.”
Her eyes returned to the page.
“But I think I may have found something about your family.”
She stepped aside.
And let the past speak for itself.