Emily shook her head and tapped her pen against the side of the can of cola she was yet to finish. It was her third and she could feel the caffeine inside her veins, making her jittery and nervous. Or at least that’s what she’d been telling herself. Nothing to do with where they were headed, or whom they were supposed to find.

The possibility that she had got it wrong, again. Or even the possibility that she hadn’t. There was a feeling, a lingering feeling she couldn’t ignore. Gigi was dead. Her grandmother was dead. So what could be the message she was about to be given, by a man who had known them both, before tragedy split apart their love?

“You two going to be okay while I’m gone?” Tyler asked as he looked between the two women.

“You’re not my babysitter.” Only it felt as if he was, because she had never been trusted to do anything alone.

Tyler left, and Emily did her best to ignore Phoebe, even though she could see her shifting in her seat, trying to look closer at what it was Emily was drawing.

“What made you change your mind about carrying on?”

“The birds.” The starlings, with all their movement, their frantic activity, yet still protecting one another, always flying as one.

“You like birds.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“No, not bad.” She turned to look out of the window, at the blur of muted greens and yellows. “Did you always like them?” Phoebe said, breathing on the windowpane, then using her finger to draw a simple flower that slowly faded away.

“I guess so.”

The first picture Emily had ever drawn was of her favorite toy. Then butterflies and flowers and fairies. Hundreds upon hundreds of fairies whom she liked to imagine lived at the bottom of the garden. Tiny, magical people who rode on the backs of all the rabbits who came to visit and one day would take Emily off on an adventure, somewhere far away. Perhaps to their secret kingdom on top of a mountain, hidden by pink clouds spun like sugar.

Emily turned to a clean page, began to create a series of concentric circles that formed into a path that led to a castle made of stone. It was somewhere she had never been, but her grandmother once showed her the pictures and told Emily it was a clearing, a mystery of a place, near her childhood home. Then she sat with her by the fire and shared what she could remember about the folklore that surrounded the faery glen.

Emily searched her mind for the first time her grandmother had told her the story, knew it was from long before. She could almost taste the chicken soup bubbling away on the stove in a kitchen, at the back of a Victorian terrace in London, where she and her grandmother would sit, dunking butter-laden bread into steaming bowls while the cat slept in the corner, in a circle of autumn sunshine. A house that once was her home, then was sold, passed on to a family new.