Emily looked down to see she had been busy drawing the face of someone she once knew: the therapist who pulled her from her darkness and showed her another way.

“Who is she?” Tyler asked as he looked at the drawing.

“Beth. Psyc…” Emily stopped as her tongue got caught on the word. “Shrink,” she said, tracing over the lines she had drawn, remembering the way that Beth’s mouth would curl up a little more on one side when she smiled. The tortoiseshell spectacles she wore on a chain around her neck, and the earrings made from Venetian glass she once told Emily were a gift from a dear, dear friend.

“What was it like?” Tyler asked as he flicked the butt of his cigarette overboard.

He meant after the accident, when Emily woke up and discovered her world had been split into a million tiny pieces and there was no way she could ever hope to put them back together again.

“Jelly.”

It had been like living in jelly, because everything seemed to be in slow motion and all the sounds were muffled.

Music helped, both because she could feel the vibrations, but also because it blocked out all the noise, the sympathetic words of people she didn’t want to hear. For so many months, Emily had wanted to be able to hear properly, and then when it happened, when she understood what they were all talking about, she wished she could go back to living in her bubble of silence.

Screwing up the scrap of paper, she stuffed it back into her pocket, wiped angrily at her eyes, at the tears that were threatening to fall.

Tyler pretended not to notice, instead took out the envelope containing her grandmother’s words and read each page in silence. She watched his eyes dart over the words, wondered what effect they were having on someone other than her.

“Why do you think she’s given you this?” He waved the blue paper at her and it caught in the wind, nearly got carried up and away. Emily grabbed at his hand, wrapped her own around the sheet.

“The people she met.” Emily looked down at their names, thought of the people she knew, imagined the faces of those she did not. She could hear their voices, picture the gait of their walk. She could see them all sitting on the banks of the river Seine, smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine. Gigi, she knew, was petite, blond, and effervescent, while she imagined Noah as being all furrowed brow, with the scent of bourbon clinging to his skin.

But she couldn’t picture her grandmother, the young Catriona so full of doubt. Couldn’t get her head around the idea that once she was shy and insecure. She wanted so badly to go back in time, to meet the girl who was no more and ask her what it was that made her change, become the woman who seemed so certain of it all.

“You think you’re supposed to find them?”