3:45
Read along with us and join the conversation all month on our Instagram account, @GMABookClub, and with #GMABookClub.
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The fire peels Notre-Dame like an illuminated manuscript soaked in water, its layers separating, releasing their secrets. The roof and spire catch, lead cladding spilling down limestone walls. Eight hundred years become liquid silver.
Inside, the medieval attic nicknamed \"la Forêt\" -- \"the Forest\" -- groans under flame, then shatters. The spire twists and falls, puncturing the heart of the vault floor below. Yet even as the ancient beams burn on, carpenter's symbols become visible on them, tool marks hidden since the twelfth century -- adze cuts, saw patterns, perfect joints. In the domed web of the ceiling, acoustic chambers emerge like loosed birds. Hollow spaces shaped to catch and amplify chants and whispers. Iron clamps tumble, each recalling a builder's quest to defy gravity, to reach beyond the possible.
Later, in the still-smoldering ruins, researchers will find more intimate human traces: names and fingerprints left in ancient mortar. A pilgrim's scratched prayer in a corner stone. A mason's hidden rendering of his daughter's face. Measured marks showing how each stone was cut, but also hesitation, correction, the yearning, imperfect moments between the dream of beauty and its execution.
And when the embers finally cool and the last of the smoke lifts, a conservator sifting through debris uncovers one last secret: a shard of pigmented glass no larger than a coin. She holds it to the light, frowning at its unusual shade. A sheer but concentrated blue that is neither cobalt nor lapis. Not the midnight blue of Chartres, but something more distilled and diaphanous, like the place where the sea meets the sky.
Perhaps it was part of an abandoned design or lost restoration, she thinks. For now, a mystery. As she sets it in the preservation box for further study, her eye catches on something etched into one corner, faint but unmistakable. A tiny bird, wings spread wide in flight. Not a formal heraldic design, but something ordinary and intimate -- a swift or swallow hand drawn for inexplicable reasons.
Closing the box, she marks its location on the cathedral's floor plan. Tomorrow she will catalog, measure, analyze. But tonight, as she walks home along the Seine, the river's dark current reflecting city lights where it once mirrored medieval torches, she thinks about her grandfather. The stories he used to tell her about the tunnels and catacombs beneath the streets of Paris. How revolutionaries and refugees left signs for one another, symbols of birds carved into the limestone to help guide them through the dark to hard-won freedom.
She only ever half believed him but now begins to wonder if this small shard of glass -- like the cathedral itself -- might carry the past and the future inside it, curled like breath. Not just a fragment, but a thread, a doorway.
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Copyright © 2026 by Paula McLain. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster. Audio read by Alexa Davalos and Michiel Huisman from the forthcoming audiobook \"SKYLARK\" by Paula McLain, to be published by Simon & Schuster Audio, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon & Schuster, LLC.
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