“I wanted to be a conservationist.” Phoebe opened a packet of mints, offered one to Emily. “To find ways to save all the incredible creatures on this planet, before humans destroy it all.”

“So be a conservationist,” Emily said, turning the mint around in her mouth. She surprised herself by saying a word that would normally have made her lips clamp shut.

“Just like that?” Phoebe was looking at Emily with a strange expression, as if she were deciding whether to leap upon the suggestion or swat it away.

“What’s stopping you?”

Phoebe paused and bit down on her bottom lip. “After graduating I applied for a job with a wildlife foundation in Rwanda. I would have been working with the local community to help develop tourism that would benefit, rather than threaten, the gorilla population.”

“What happened?”

A small smile, a shrug of shoulder, a look behind to see if anyone was coming back.

“I decided to spend some time in France. It really helps, you know, to be fluent in something other than English.”

She turned it down for him. Emily was suddenly so angry that Phoebe would turn down her future for someone who was about to move to the other side of the world without giving anyone else a second thought.

Her grandmother’s face swam into her mind, from when she was young, from the photograph given to her in Paris. A woman who chose to do it all alone, who chose not to marry, not to conform. Someone who had always told Emily that society took far longer to catch up with the views of individuals than was necessary, who told her that she shouldn’t care what other people thought, because at the end of it all there’s no one to answer to for your decisions, other than yourself.

“Don’t change your life for anyone.”

Phoebe made a small noise, nodded, then shook her head as she stared up at the ceiling. She looked like she was either about to punch something or scream. It was a look Emily recognized all too well, because it was exactly the same way she felt every single time she thought about what could have been, when she dreamt of the life she could have had, felt she deserved, if it hadn’t been for one split second on a summer’s afternoon.

It was how she had felt during her recovery, when others were trying to get her to talk, to walk, because what was the point of it all if they were gone? If her parents, and now her grandmother, weren’t there with her, loving her, giving her a family, what was the point? What was the point of anything if you had no one to share it with?

“Like Mary.” Phoebe sniffed loudly, began to drum her fingers on the table.

“Who?”

“Mary,” she said again, peeling back the foil on her packet of mints, then putting two more in her mouth. “From your grandmother’s book.”

“You’ve read Imagination?” Emily was always surprised when people talked about her grandmother’s earlier work. More often than not, all they ever wanted to do was gush about the brilliance, the genius, of Ophelia.