She was shaking her head, over and over, willing him to comprehend what she was so scared about. What she knew she could not do.

“Emily?” Tyler put both hands on her shoulders, tried to get her to look at him. “What’s wrong?”

She couldn’t willingly go into a tunnel underneath the sea. A long, dark tunnel with no light and no air and all that water pressing down from above. She would be trapped inside a tube of metal with no way out. Just like before.

“Mum?” Emily barely breathed the word and it came out caught in a sob.

“Shit,” Tyler edged closer, wrapped his arms around Emily and drew her close. “I’m sorry, Em, I just didn’t think.”

“Mum,” Emily whispered again, shaking her head against the bundle of disjointed images she couldn’t quite make sense of, didn’t want to make sense of. A car, the world flipping in and over itself, a flash of black and the dull thud, thud, thud of pain all the way along her spine. She knew the feeling would pass. But all she could do was sit, trapped in her own fear, unable to claw her way out of the darkness and back to reality.

So she let him rock her gently, to and fro. She breathed in his words of comfort, kept her eyes tight shut and waited for her heart to calm.

Then the sound of a message sent, an urgent ping, calling out its demand to be heard and pulling his attention away. Up he got, muttering an apology, saying he would be right back. She was left alone in his parents’ kitchen, with nothing more than a book and another memento from her grandmother’s past. A memory she wanted to discover but was frightened of where else it might lead.

Blue-black clouds hung in the sky as Emily looked out of the window, watching dusk approach. This was when it was hardest not to cry, not to remember summer sunsets with her mother singing, her father smoking a cigar as he taught her all the constellations or sat waiting for a shooting star. Wishing upon wishing they were somewhere in the world, watching the passing of another day.

When it was quiet, she could still hear their laughter. The low rumble in his belly, the softer trill at the back of her throat. The way they spoke to one another as if no one else were in the room. Sometimes she believed they were still with her, or perhaps it was just her imagination.

Which was why she always had to cover up the silence with music, needed it to drown out the pictures, the memories in her mind, in order to stop her from painting what she missed most of all.

Opening the window, she heard the whistle of a bird somewhere high in a tree, a bird that called out to her, told a story through song. Perhaps he had yellow feathers and had flown free from his cage to soar up and through the sky. Maybe he had come to try and help cover some of her pain, if only for a little while.