The Museum of Things That Never Existed

Nora Fairbank works in her family's lost property shop, where four thousand one hundred and six forgotten things sit on numbered shelves, waiting for owners who are never coming back. Nora has catalogued every one of them. She believes, more than she believes anything, that everything has a history.

Then she opens a suitcase nobody claimed, and finds a photograph of a street that is not on any map, a woman nobody remembers, and a date that has not happened yet.

Hidden inside the photograph is a ticket.

THE NULL MUSEUM. ONE VISITOR. ONE EXHIBIT.

DO NOT RETURN THE OBJECT.

Behind an ordinary brick wall, Nora finds a building the size of a shed with a hall inside it the size of a county. It holds snow from a winter that never arrived. A telephone containing a four-minute conversation between two people who were never born. A wedding cake, still fresh, for a wedding that had nowhere to happen. And four thousand paper name tags, hanging in a wind that does not exist.

One exhibit is missing. There is no broken lock, no forced door and no record of a theft, and the only person who can explain it is a curator who has been guarding a secret for sixty-one years.

To find the truth, Nora will have to break the museum's rules, outwit a woman nobody is able to remember, and answer the question the museum has been asking for four hundred years:

if nobody remembers something, does that mean it never mattered?