“I could have played with Grandpa if he were here,” Sam says.

“He’d have liked that,” I say.

We weave through some more streets, leaving the busier and more touristy areas behind again, and after a while Abigail stops at the entrance to a nondescript brown building and hits the buzzer for a second-floor apartment. I think I see a tremor in her hand as she lowers it.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice says. It doesn’t sound like the voice of anyone I know. I had sort of expected it to sound familiar; like Abigail’s voice

“It’s us,” Abigail says into the intercom, and it clicks and buzzes. My sister leads us inside and up a shabby flight of steps with the automatic movements of someone already familiar with the place. The door on the second floor opens before we reach it and a woman stands there, tall and thin, smiling slightly.

A woman with my sister’s eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lorna’s gaze pans across our little trio. Her eyes are bright, her face soft as she takes us in. I think how extraordinary it must be for her to see Sam; probably even more unreal, in a way, than seeing Abigail again.

“Well,” she says. “You must be Sam. My goodness.” She stares at him a moment longer before turning to me. “And Gillian. You look like Gloria.”

“You look like Abigail,” I say, and she smiles a wry, eyebrow-raised smile. It’s like my sister’s, but different. I feel a shivery sense of disjunction, standing here in front of this woman with my sister’s eyes. A familiar stranger, strangely familiar.

“Hi,” Sam says, radiating curiosity. Both he and Lorna seem pretty relaxed, funnily enough. I’m certainly not, and I can almost feel Abigail’s nerves sparking beside me.

“It’s all very strange, isn’t it, Sam?” Lorna turns towards him. “Well, come on in.”

She waves us into an apartment that’s modest in size—considerably smaller than my house, and it would probably fit in Abigail’s Westchester home eight times over—but vibrantly painted and decorated. We walk through an ochre-colored hallway into a bright living room full of furniture and ornaments, with smoked-glass mirrors and a collection of prints adorning the walls. The art is eclectic, everything from tiny oil paintings the size of an egg carton to framed prints of birds and sea creatures. Sam stares around him as though he’s found himself inside of a curiosity cabinet, and I feel a bit the same.

Lorna follows his eyes and smiles.

“Yes, I’m a bit…eccentric, I suppose, in my design choices. I like having the reminders of the places I’ve seen, you see.”