“Where are we?” Beth asked as they reached a simple wooden bench close to the shore of the lake.

“Is that a rhetorical question?” Her tongue slipped through the words, almost stumbling, but Emily didn’t flinch, didn’t waver, because she no longer felt ashamed.

“How did you get here?”

“On a motorbike.”

“Who brought you?”

“Noah.”

“And how did you find him?”

How did she find him? How did she manage to find any of it? How did she manage to leave behind her familiar, stagnating life to set out on an adventure dreamt up by the mind of a dead woman?

“Just sit here a moment.” Beth eased Emily onto the bench. “Sit here and think of her, of where she’s brought you. Where you’ve come from. Sit here and think of all the ways in which you are mad at her, all the ways you wish she was here, just so you could scream at her for dying. But allow yourself to remember, too, what it was she was trying to show you.”

“So this is the end?”

“Or the beginning, depending on how you look at it.” Beth handed her the envelope containing her grandmother’s final clue. “As a little girl I would rise early in the morning, listen for the gokotta. I liked to think they were singing just for me.”

“The what?” Emily stared at what she held in her hands, not wanting to think about what she was supposed to do now.

“Cuckoo. They used to live in the woods behind my home, back in Sweden. Do you remember?”

“I remember.” A memory popped into her head, of making angels in the snow, then back to the house for a hot drink and to toast her toes by the open fire. A visit one winter, before relocating to Norfolk. Walks in the forest, listening to the call of birds, staring into the face of a deer that didn’t care how broken or disfigured she was. Water like ice that her grandmother dared to swim through. Her skin pink and bright, her smile wide and pure as she wrapped herself in layer after layer of blankets and shook droplets of cold onto Emily’s face.

“You should go back,” Beth said. “Make some new memories.” A gentle pat on Emily’s shoulder and then Beth was gone, back toward the house, toward her patients. Because Emily didn’t belong here, not anymore. This place held nothing more than memories for her, which is why she couldn’t figure out what it was she was meant to have found by coming back.

No more clues. No more signs or stops along the way. This was it, right here and now.

The soft call of a nightingale singing in the trees, a rustle of leaves as an accompaniment. It seemed that birds would follow her wherever she went, or did she seek them out? Find comfort in their presence, their meanings? Did she always have such a fascination about them, or did that only come after the accident, when she looked for hidden meanings in anything and everything all at once?