So much had happened. So many people and places forced upon her, but for what? Why make her come back to this place, with all its reminders of the long, slow recovery she had to endure? Why force her to go through it all if there was no manuscript to discover, if, in fact, there was never any need for her to leave home at all?

Sheets of palest blue fluttered in the breeze, pages from her grandmother’s diary that were waiting to be read. Emily had been shown a piece of her grandmother’s life, several pieces that all slotted together but didn’t quite make the whole story. One summer that changed it all. One moment, one decision, one resounding “yes” to an idea, an adventure, presented to her via a book.

Would Catriona have become a writer if it weren’t for what happened in Paris? Meeting Antoine and Gigi. And Noah. All of them. They all touched her, impacted her life, in some profound way. Charlie published her books. Beth put back together a broken, wounded child. Stories linked them all.

Somewhere in each of her grandmother’s books there was a message, a lesson, a hidden truth—something she had learnt along the way and wanted to impress upon her granddaughter, on all the children who read her stories. Each character, each place, took inspiration from her own life, her own highs and lows, because it’s not possible to appreciate the good without the bad. The light without the dark. The joy without the sorrow.

“But most of all,” Emily whispered. “Most of all, we have to try.”

Shoes off, Emily curled her toes into the grass; imagined them digging deeper, exploring the earth and all the creatures hidden below. She shuffled off the bench to lie on her back, felt the soft blades like a cushion beneath her, spread her arms wide and stared up at the great curve of blue. She breathed in the crispness of the air and watched the clouds that passed overhead, reaching out to one another, something joining to make something new.

“Come on, Poppet.”

A fragment of a memory from this exact spot. On a day so similar to today, when a girl and a woman sat by this lake, waiting for something to change.

“Tell me what you see.”

The girl turned her head away, closed her eyes as a solitary tear splashed to the ground. She began to pull at the blades of grass, ripping them from the soil and tossing them away. The woman sighed, a heavy slant of shoulder suggesting just how tired she was. For a while they sat like this, together but so very far apart. Then a duck appeared from the rushes by the lake, followed close behind by a line of ducklings. One by one they toppled into the water to swim after their mother, a dozen or so little webbed feet, working frantically under the surface in order to keep up, not wanting to be left behind.