Emily heard a drawer being opened, then the sound of something being placed on top of the desk.

I don’t want it. Emily dropped her head. I don’t want to know what it is she made me come here for.

But she did want to know, or at least part of her knew it was pointless to try to resist. So she stood up, went over to the desk, and opened up the package, because she had come this far and it would be a complete waste of time, of life, to give up now.

Inside a white manila envelope were a few familiar sheets of palest blue, folded in half, along with a handful of lined pages, torn along one edge and tied through a hole with red string.

Emily took a breath. Could they be the missing pages, the story Catriona Robinson was rumored to have written?

“I don’t understand,” she said as she flicked through the pages, only to see that most of them were empty. A few ideas, places and names. Nothing more substantial than what was in the notebook given to Emily by the bookseller, all the way back in Norfolk. Why rip them out? Why send her all the way here to find absolutely nothing at all?

“Where’s the finished book?” Emily looked at Beth.

“I’m sorry, Emily,” she said with hands splayed. “I don’t have anything else.”

Emily flicked through the pages once again, back and forth, as if somehow more words would appear. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all she sent me. That,”—Beth pointed at the manila envelope—“along with the real will, and a letter.”

“The real will?”

Emily looked back inside the envelope to find something she had missed, then scanned the words typed neatly on several pages and signed at the end by her grandmother.

“It says here that the house is mine.” Emily sank into a nearby armchair.

“Yes.” Beth perched on the end of her desk, watching Emily closely.

“It says that it’s always been mine.” Emily’s hands began to shake as she drank in the enormity of what she had just discovered. “That the estate, the rights, the books. It all belongs to me.”

Emily felt light-headed, but wasn’t sure if it was due to shock, relief, or something more.

“Who else was she going to give it to?”

“It makes no sense.” Emily’s hands dropped to her lap. “Why bring me here, back to the beginning, like in one of her stupid books, only for it not to be finished?”

“Maybe that’s the point.”

“Why make me go through all of this,” she said, waving her arms out theatrically. “If the house belonged to me all along?”

“Would you have left if she’d given you a choice?”

Emily opened her mouth, then shut it again. In that moment she realized how, only a short while ago, she never would have believed it possible that she could be sitting here, having a conversation, an argument, with the woman who had inadvertently taught her how to hide behind her paintings. The woman who, though she helped put her back together, also made her shy away.