“I’m sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“Forgetting.”

Noah exhaled slowly. “It’s not something you need to apologize for. You were broken in so many ways. All she ever wanted was for you to get better.”

“What about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“She was broken too.” Emily was crying again thinking about how hard it must have been for her grandmother, how for years all Emily could focus on was her own pain, what she had lost, never stopping to think about the ways in which her grandmother had suffered too.

“Losing a child isn’t something anyone can ever even begin to imagine. The tragic unfairness of it all. But she had you.”

“All I did was push her away.”

“You were her reason not to give up.” He took hold of her shoulders, brought his face close to hers. “Do you have any idea how much she loved you? How much she adored the time you had together?”

“I miss her.” It was no more than the suggestion of a whisper. Words felt but hardly spoken.

“So do I, mia cara, so do I.”

“Why didn’t you stay, or come back to England with us?”

“She didn’t want me to.”

“Because of me.” Everything her grandmother had turned her back on, abandoned, was because of her.

“No,” he said firmly. “That fault lies entirely with me. I was trying to save her, always trying to save her, and that’s never what she wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to understand, back then, for her to decide to raise Margot by herself was more than hard. Everyone was telling her not to. Everyone had an opinion on it, but she felt completely alone.”

“She had you.”

“Yes, but I didn’t have her. She was fierce and strong and annoyingly stubborn,” he said with a poignant look at Emily. “But she was also right. We would never have worked because I was trying to make her into something, someone, she was not.”

Emily thought of the heroine from her grandmother’s second book, who, at the very end, when she had what others would deem a perfect life, decided to walk out on her fiancé. A woman who took passage on an ocean liner to Australia, hoping to start a life of her own with nothing in her pocket but a handful of hope.

“You are more like her than you think,” Noah said, holding out a brown paper parcel, tied up with string. “Come,” he said, taking her arm and escorting her back to the terrace. “You can read while we eat.”

Someone had set down two enormous silver domes and placed a bottle of prosecco in an ice bucket next to the table to chill. Emily lifted her dome high to reveal the scent of sweet chili, salt, and lashings of lemon.

“Eat,” Noah said as he poured her a drink. “You look like you need fattening up for Christmas.”

Taking a long sip, feeling the crisp explosion of bubbles against her tongue, Emily pulled apart the brown paper and lifted out the next clue.