“You just said the dedication was for Giancarlo.” Tyler began to gather all his belongings together, checked his watch, then his phone.

“It is.” I think. She brushed at her arms, waited for the momentary chill to pass.

“Then what’s the problem?”

The problem was that Emily had no desire to arrive on the doorstep of an elderly man and ask him about his dead wife. And if she was wrong, if Giancarlo wasn’t the next person she was supposed to find, she would be subjecting him to painful, horrible memories that he had probably spent most of his life trying to forget.

Emily pushed back her chair and stood up. “I want to go,” she said, picking up her suitcase and making sure it was zipped shut.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call first?” Tyler tossed some coins onto the table as a tip.

“No.” Emily started to walk away. “I want to go home.”

Something was telling her to flee, to get as far away from Rome and Verona and all of her grandmother’s memories as fast as she possibly could. There was no sense to it, no rhyme nor reason for the murky sensation in her stomach. But it was there, a slither of fear mixed through with doubt. Something that seemed to be warning her about what was waiting just around the corner, if she didn’t run.

“You can’t go home.” Tyler grabbed her arm, forced her to stop.

“Why not?” Emily could see Phoebe hovering just behind, and she wanted to shout at her, to tell her to stop looking, stop listening, just stop being there, to leave her alone. For them both to leave her alone.

He hesitated, looked away and down, which told her all she needed to know and more.

“The money.”

“No, not just the money. I mean, yes, your money. Your inheritance. Your home, Emily. It’s not there unless you see this thing through.”

She shook herself free of him. “What if I don’t want to?”

“You don’t have a choice.”

Emily hated him in that moment, simply because he was right. “I could go to my aunt.”

Tyler frowned. “The one in New York?”

“Why not?”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

Probably true, given that Emily hadn’t seen her since her twenty-first birthday, when her aunt and her husband did nothing but talk about how fantastic their lives were. They were the sort of people who would point out a crooked painting on the wall, or say that the lawn needed mowing.

Her father’s sister. A woman whose face was as starched as her shirt, with a choker of pearls around her scrawny neck, hair like a helmet, and two boys dressed identically in blazers and bow ties. Of course she couldn’t go and stay with them; it would be even more torturous than traveling through Europe with Tyler and his annoying girlfriend.

“What’s one more day?” Tyler called out as Emily walked away. “Come on, Emily, you’ve come this far, it would be stupid to walk away now.”