Emily felt him shift beside her, sat back to see him holding out her sketchbook. The one she left behind in Verona.

“You brought that all this way.”

“I did. For my sins.”

“Why?”

“Because you need to see, to really see, what you’re capable of.”

He opened it to the first picture drawn on their journey. A drawing of a couple of seagulls, standing opposite each other, beaks open as if having a conversation. One of them sat on top of a unicycle, the other held a newspaper under its wing. A newspaper with a headline printed in bold, reporting the death of Britain’s favorite children’s author.

The next was of Tyler, walking through a field of silver and blue grass. All those notes twisting up to become a flock of migrating birds, heading off to unknown lands. What she hadn’t realized at the time was that she had drawn herself into that very same picture. Walking along beside him, with a battered yellow suitcase in tow.

More pictures. More surprises, but each of them linked somehow to the journey she was being forced to take. A sketch of her grandmother and a man, seated on a bench in a town by a lake, heads dipped close together and a baby asleep in a pram, close by.

A group of hummingbirds sat on a branch, watching as a couple danced under the Eiffel Tower, illuminated only by the moon. The woman was wearing a fifties-style dress, the man was holding tight to a small velvet box, inside of which Emily knew was a diamond ring.

So many pictures she did not remember creating. So many tiny details she had hidden in them all.

Then the last. All those starlings she saw in Rome, minute specks of brown that she drew over and over to form the face of a woman. Her face. Her torment and fear all gathered up in what she mistook for a tornado.

“You’ve always done it,” Tyler said, going back to the picture of Ophelia on her bike, pointing to the shepherd with his flock. Only then did Emily realize whose face she had really painted. Only then did she understand what it was Tyler had come to show her.

“I didn’t know,” she gasped, turning each page in reverse. All the way back to a pearlescent cockatoo, with wings stretched wide, ready to soar toward the setting sun as it dipped below the horizon. Back to the very first one in the book, showing her grandmother propped up in bed. Emily had drawn it as she slept, unaware of how she had replaced Catriona’s face with that of her mother, imagined her old and worn through with time. How she wished she could have been allowed to survive, for them all to have been a family.

By putting them down on paper, she had kept them trapped, kept her grief trapped and unable to be set free. But she had never learnt to deal with any of it—never learnt to grieve, to mourn, to accept that death is an inevitable, horrific, part of life.