“Emily?”

Her hand was poised, ready to take the letter, but now she hesitated, as if she was stuck in limbo. Because what if it told her something she didn’t want to know?

Emily swallowed away her fear, looked out of the window, at the world rushing by. A green, lazy landscape blurred like a dream, making her feel as if none of it were quite real.

“Do you want me to open it for you?”

“No.”

“Fine. Suit yourself,” Tyler said as he dropped the letter on the table, sat back, and put his headphones on. One last look passed between them before he closed his eyes.

Emily placed her palm on the table next to the envelope with her name written on it. There was no clue as to what lay within.

She glanced at Tyler, allowed herself to examine the way his body moved gently to the beat of whatever song he was listening to. Part of her wanted to sketch him, to use the feeling of pen on paper as a way of delaying what had to come. Running her fingers across the cover of her sketchbook, she thought about drawing that man and his sparrows, the birds taking flight to weave in and out of the shadows, up and over the train.

“Okay,” Emily said as she sat a little straighter, puffed out her cheeks and blew away the doubt. She turned the envelope over and broke the seal.

The pages she took out were of the palest blue and thin, not quite as delicate as tissue paper, but not so thick as to prevent the light from passing through. They were covered on both sides in a looping hand that barely resembled the usual neatness Emily had expected of her grandmother. In places, the letters were smudged, or the tail of a “Y” elongated, as if her grandmother had been disturbed, or nudged, as she was writing.

But it wasn’t a letter at all; it was part of a diary. And, given the date at the top of the entry, it was written long before Emily had been born.

7 April 1965

“When you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worthwhile.”

I’m on a train, a dog-eared paperback of Anne of Green Gables tucked into the front pocket of my suitcase, with its worn-down pages, my eight-year-old scribbles on the inside cover and all my favorite parts underlined. Because I couldn’t leave without it. Without the book that made me fall in love with storytelling, made me want to be something more. Without this quote, which pretty much sums up how I am trying to feel right now.

It’s raining. Which is a completely unimportant detail to include, but I feel that I need to write down absolutely everything I can think of until I figure out what sort of diary this is going to be. Because I’m here, or there, or nowhere at all, but the point is I have left. I am gone from that tiny little seaside version of hell that my parents like to think of as home and I’m heading toward London.