The Registry preserves love. That's the word in the charter.

For three centuries, Brannock Hill ? nine storeys of pale stone ? has kept the city's love: citizens climb the hill, speak their names to a clerk, and the seal presses their affection into paper before it can be lost. An archivist of the fourth stack has spent eleven years trusting that. Then he finds a woman named Liora in three thousand records, loved by three thousand different citizens across sixty years ? and not once, in any of them, does she appear as the one doing the loving.

Every person who ever declared her is gone by morning, and doesn't know it.

The Registry doesn't erase love. It keeps it ? perfectly, permanently, and only once, off the same uncomplaining woman, forever. What one careful, quiet man does when he finds out, and what it costs him to do it, is the rest of this book.

A novella of institutional horror and consuming, doomed desire.