Emily backed away from the enthusiastic assistant, noticing as she did so that a couple of other customers were now looking in their direction.

“Do you have it, or not?” Tyler asked, a note of boredom in his voice.

“Sorry?” The assistant seemed to have forgotten Tyler was there. All his attention was on the young woman with eyes as bright as pennies, who was tapping the fingers of her left hand onto the countertop, over and over. “Oh, right, yes. The package,” he said, watching the repetitive movement of Emily’s fingers, seeing the way her lips were moving but no sound was coming out. “It’s right over here, next to the birdcage.”

Emily’s fingers stopped their tapping as she saw him go over to the cage and pick up a small package, identical to all the others on the display apart from a sticker in the top right-hand corner. A sticker of a little gray duck wearing a spotted bow tie.

Why didn’t I see this earlier? Emily wondered, noting that Terence stood next to a pair of Wellington boots with silver stars dotted all over them, the same boots she had worn as a child and first drawn for the girl named Ophelia. Later the boots were changed to pink, with a purple flower on the side. The original version had never made it into final print.

Everything about Ophelia was what Emily had imagined her to be. A little smaller than average, with curly dark hair that she liked to wear in pigtails, or in a knot on top of her head. Eyes of green that sparkled when she was excited, a button nose, and a lopsided grin as wide as her face. What she hadn’t been able to draw, not at first, was the fierceness of her anger when someone had been wronged. Or the way her fingers would wriggle with excitement when she and Terence would open up the atlas to discover where it would take them next. Or how she would lay awake at night, wishing upon wishing she had been born with someone else’s legs.

All of that came from her grandmother. She was the one to weave her magic with words, not Emily.

“That’s why I was so worried when I saw you looking.” The assistant held out the package to her, then took his phone from his back pocket and quickly snapped a photograph.

Emily blinked, then looked around, past Tyler, to where a crowd was beginning to gather. A collection of faces and phones, all pointing at her, documenting the event, ready to be shared with people all over the globe. Millions of likes and comments on social media, wondering about what the package contained—whether it could be the infamous last manuscript of the late, great Catriona Robinson.

The screens lit up, over and over again, and Emily stared at all those strangers, all those people who thought they had a right to know. Just as they always had, asking questions, wanting to know about her grandmother. Wanting to know about her.