If you don’t try, you’ll never know. It had been one of her grandmother’s favorite catchphrases. A mantra of sorts that she would dish out during the first few years of Emily’s recovery, whenever she stubbornly refused to join in. But what on earth did it have to do with where she was now?

She turned around, walked through the shop to the children’s section, to where row upon row of books by Catriona Robinson sat. Emily removed one, flicked to the dedication page, saw the same two words as had always been—For Emily—then put it back again. She took out another, this one whose cover had a picture of a girl swimming under the sea, a bright pearl clutched tight in her hand.

For Emily.

Another, with the same little girl soaring on an enormous swing through a starry sky.

For Emily.

Each and every dedication was the same—apart from the one she had just been given.

It was a clue. A clue to the next part of the puzzle her grandmother had put together in secret, that she’d kept hidden from her. But why?

“The first one is my favorite,” the bookseller said, pointing at one of the books Emily had discarded on the floor. “The idea of a magical atlas, transporting a little girl with a disability all over the world. Teaching her about people and places she could never hope to know. I only wish I had that kind of imagination.”

The stories had been their way of escaping, of pretending that the real world wasn’t there, if only for a little while. But life, Emily knew, had a way of creeping up on you, even when you were doing everything you possibly could to pretend it wasn’t.

“I can’t,” Emily whispered, leaning against the bookcase and closing her eyes. She could see herself as a girl of thirteen, seated in a wheelchair beside a lake. Her legs were wrapped in a tartan blanket with tassels she liked to twist into plaits. Her face was bandaged tight so that only her nose and one eye peeped free, and, overhead, nightingales called out their evening song. By her side, just like every night since the accident, was her grandmother, with a flask full of hot chocolate and a red leather notebook, open on her lap.

Would it have come to this if not for that twist of fate, when her grandmother’s publisher had come to visit and asked if she had been working on anything new? Emily sat in the back garden, quietly reading, and Catriona had decided to show her friend the outline of a children’s book, along with Emily’s illustrations. If she had never discovered the book, would Emily still be standing in a tumbledown shop, being asked from beyond the grave to complete a ridiculous treasure hunt in order to claim her inheritance?

The scent of tobacco, laced through with vanilla, pulled Emily from her thoughts, and she opened her eyes to see the bookseller drawing deep on a curved wooden pipe. Tendrils of smoke made their way up and out of the back door, mixing into the sky without a trace. He looked like a character from one of her grandmother’s books: all waxed mustache and twinkly eyes.