“If you don’t go back up now, you never will,” he had said with a smile, then kissed her cheek, straightened her scarf and made her climb once more to the summit. He had waited with a wave at the bottom until she got back on, kicked off from the ground and went soaring through the snow, feeling in that moment as free as any child ever could.

Face your fears. Don’t give in to the voices of doubt. Embrace the terror because you never know where it might lead you.

So many lessons taught, but all those memories pushed away.

He always told her to trust her gut, but she had been ignoring it for years, which meant she ended up as nothing more than a girl, standing outside a train station, too afraid to finish what she started. Too afraid to find out what was waiting for her in a town by a lake.

This one’s for you, Dad, Emily thought to herself as she picked up her suitcase and walked toward a waiting taxi.

20

HERON

Ardeidae

On the southern shores of Lake Garda sits the town of Sirmione. At the far end of its peninsula and completely surrounded by water is a medieval castle, a fortification used by the Scaliger family to protect the town from invasion.

It was at the top of this fortress that Emily stood, staring across the gentle waters of the lake, watching as hundreds of boats crisscrossed the horizon, carrying tourists from port to port. One of them could well belong to the man she was looking for.

Below was an assortment of streets, and buildings with tiled roofs, evenly spaced windows and thick shutters to keep out the heat. The land stretched out into the lake on either side, clusters of cypress trees breaking up the blue with leaves so dark they almost looked black, and the Italian flag sitting limp atop its pole, with no breeze to make it dance.

The taxi driver had dropped her on a strip of road, no doubt glad to be rid of the strange English girl who insisted on having the windows down and music turned up full for the whole journey. Emily had sat on a bench, head between her knees, waiting for her heart to return to a normal rhythm. In her hand she clutched the scrap of paper given to her by the taxi driver, with the name and location of Bailey’s Boats. Noah Bailey, the man who asked Catriona Robinson to love him forever, in sickness and in health. Except she rejected him, and Emily wanted to know why her grandmother had turned her back on the man she loved most of all. Was it something he did, or did not do? Or something entirely more complicated?

Tyler was in her head now too. Had her grandmother an ulterior motive for choosing him as her guardian and accomplice? Had she hoped they’d find one another after all these years and become something more than just long-lost friends? Would it have made any difference if he had kissed her in the bar in St. Tropez, or if Phoebe hadn’t turned up?