“Where is he?”

“Verona.” The city of love. Of Romeo and Juliet. She remembered the balcony her grandmother told her about when she first sat down to study Shakespeare. A place where people left letters of hope, of loss, not only of desire.

“You’re sure?” Tyler was already busy with his phone, no doubt mapping out the next part of their journey. No doubt figuring out how to get it all over and done with, so he could forge ahead with his life.

“Yes.” But her head shook itself no. Because she wasn’t sure. Not now. Not when she had brought them here by mistake.

“We could always call ahead?” Phoebe suggested. “Just in case.”

“No.” How could she call up a man she had never met—or had she? Something was there, a man’s voice, low and strong. But it was all hidden behind a layer of doubt, of confusion, so she wasn’t able to figure out if it was real or just the memory of something she was searching for but couldn’t reach, cobbled together from whatever story her grandmother had told. Reality and fiction always puddled together, making it so hard for Emily to try to see the difference between the two.

“Giancarlo Delucci,” Tyler said as he read from the screen of his phone. “Together with his late wife Virginia, Signor Delucci wrote a bestselling collection of Italian cookbooks and opened a two-star Michelin restaurant in the heart of Verona.”

“Sounds like our guy,” Phoebe said.

Tyler turned the phone around, showed Emily a picture of a man standing by a workbench, rolling out sheets of pasta and smiling back at the camera. Back in Norfolk, there was a black-and-white photograph on the mantelpiece in the living room of Gigi wearing a lace wedding dress. She was being kissed by a man, tall and thin, with a sunflower in a buttonhole. The man was the same as in the photograph Tyler had gleaned from the Internet, only Emily had never seen his whole face before.

All the people her grandmother adored but never took her to see. People who were a part of her world, her life, but became nothing more than memories after her parents died.

Emily wondered why she had spent so little time with her grandmother before. What was it that made her such a fleeting part of her childhood? Catriona had spent her whole life traveling, exploring, living, and then all of a sudden she had stopped. It was as if she had simply cut herself free from the past in order to protect her family.

“She’s dead,” Emily said, realizing that her mother wasn’t the only person her grandmother had loved and lost. She began to fear that there was something more about meeting Giancarlo than simply retrieving another book, another clue.

“Who’s dead?” Phoebe said, rubbing at her leg and ignoring the look on Tyler’s face.

“Gigi.” Despite the heat, Emily shivered, felt the hairs along her arms all stand up in a row, because she was beginning to think that this quest, this puzzle, had nothing to do with the books after all.