“You still listen to rock music?” he asked without looking up from his phone.

Emily nodded as she tried to remember which CDs she had shoved into her suitcase. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, she fiddled with her hair, sat on both hands, and tried not to look at the line of light that fell across his face, tried to dampen the urge to ask him to turn a little more to the left, because then the light would cut straight across the bone at his cheek.

“Guns N’ Roses?”

“Also Foo,” Emily said, allowing him to fill in what she didn’t trust her tongue to be able to pronounce. Along with Chopin, Miles Davis, David Bowie, and Adele. Her grandmother was the sort of person to try anything and everything at least once, so Emily had been taught to appreciate them all.

Her days and nights had been filled with sounds from every era. She had been told to listen for the soft crackle of vinyl before the needle found the first note, or the faintest intake of breath before Miss Simone opened her mouth to sing. To hear the story each artist was trying to tell.

But not opera. Never opera.

“I used to think you were so cool.”

“Ha.” The laugh left her mouth before she knew it was even there.

It used to be for fun, the music. The drums. The way the throb and pulse of it would fill her and make her move. Then it served a different purpose: to block it out. To block everything out.

“I don’t have anything in your kind of league,” Tyler said as he turned his phone around to show her the playlist he’d been considering. “But I could download something and we could listen to it together?”

Emily looked at the screen.

“I like country,” Tyler said with a smile and a shrug. “Doesn’t make me a bad person.”

She knew he was trying to placate her, trying to work that effervescent charm of his because it was probably always that easy. A smile, a token gesture, and women simply lapped it all up.

“Letter,” Emily said as she held out her hand, watched his smile fade away.

“I’m assuming you know where we’re going? Once we get to London, I mean?”

Emily nodded, waiting for him to rummage through his bag; to take out a crumpled envelope much thicker, more promising, than the one she had been given by the stranger at her house yesterday morning. But a part of her wished she could pretend that she had no idea where her grandmother was leading her back to.

“Hatchards,” she said, stumbling a little over the word.

“Where Ophelia found the atlas?”

“Yes.”

“That was nice and easy. I half expected a complicated riddle, or a puzzle box, with us running all over London trying to figure it out, like in The Da Vinci Code.”

She stared at the letter Tyler was holding. There was time, surely? Even if she got one of the clues wrong, there would be time to solve it, because for her grandmother to set an impossible task, with so much at stake, would surely be too cruel. Perhaps the letter was an apology, a note of contrition, telling her it was all just a huge misunderstanding, that she could get off the train, go back home, and forget this day ever happened.