Emily nodded in agreement as she remembered Tyler curled up asleep on the floor of the overnight ferry back from France. He was the only one oblivious to the thunder that had ripped through the sky, unaffected by the sickening tilt of the boat.

“And I promise not to try and force you into any kind of decision. I mean, it’s your life, who am I to tell you what to do with it?”

Emily walked around the garden, occasionally reaching out to deadhead a bush, listening to all the words that spilled from Tyler’s mouth as he followed. He was still talking to her when she went into the greenhouse to open the vents, about the time she stood up to a playground bully, punching him square on the nose when he dared to call Tyler a “pussy.” It had always been the two of them, all the way through childhood and into adolescence, when it was Emily who had been the daredevil, the leader, the inventor of games.

Because I don’t know you anymore, she thought as she looked across to see a scrap of paper, marked with black handwriting, caught on the branch of an apple tree. She only knew the boy from before.

Inside the house, in one of the boxes she had so carefully packed away, was a photo album from long ago. One she had opened, then shut away quickly, because she knew it ended after her thirteenth birthday. It remained half full of blank spaces where all her memories should have been, key moments in life that she had once assumed would include Tyler and his family. But even though his face filled so many of the pages in that album, and his laugh, his willingness to please, were in so many moments from Emily’s past, there was so much more that he hadn’t been a part of, and that was what she was finding hardest of all to forgive.

Later that evening, when the dishes were cleaned away and the sofa bed laid out, on which Tyler was perched, quietly picking out a tune on his guitar, Emily sat once again at the kitchen table.

I’ll decide in the morning, she told herself as she tidied away her sketchbook and pen, tried not to think of the half-finished cockatoo.

She stood and whistled into the dark, waiting for Milton to come for his supper. When he failed to make an appearance, she put a plate of broken pieces of naan bread on the lawn and slid the bolt across the bottom of the door, before climbing the stairs and slipping into bed. The window was open and Emily watched the clouds drift past a moon that was so very nearly full.

New beginnings. Emily remembered what her grandmother had always said when the moon was round and ripe. The chance to start over, to set new intentions, to begin anew.

But what if she didn’t want to start again?

Emily turned from the moon and all its false promises, wrapping her palm around the locket she couldn’t quite bring herself to take off that night.