“I can’t do this.” Emily felt the ache along her scar. Not the one on her cheek, but the one that reached all the way around her spine and down her leg. It was too much, too many highs and lows all tangled up together.

“Yes, you can,” Tyler said, resting a hand on her arm. “It’s just one more day.”

For him, maybe, but for her it was forever.

She pushed him away. “I want to go home.”

“I know, I get it.” He followed her out of the shop, watched as she turned left, then right, then left again. “It’s frustrating as hell to only be given half the clue, half the answer. But you did find it. And the one in London. And you found them really easily, which means this next one will be just the same.”

Emily didn’t answer, because she was afraid to admit that she had absolutely no idea who Antoine was.

Marching ahead, the river to her right, Emily barely even noticed the crowds all heading toward Notre Dame. She didn’t think about how she was walking through the streets of a city she had come to as a child, but had since only ever visited in her mind. A city she dreamt of—the romance, the history, the art—but never thought she would have the courage to come back to. Sometimes she thought she would never again have any courage at all.

“Look, we’re both exhausted.” His stride had fallen in with her own; quickened then slowed so that they walked in perfect sync. “And hungry. Are you hungry? I know I am. Why don’t we go and get something to eat? There’s a place not far from here we can try.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You say that now,” he replied with a grin. “But wait until you try their coconut moules and fresh baguettes. Absolute heaven, I promise.”

Emily scuffed the ground with her feet, stared across the road to one of many bridges in Paris dominated by padlocks, a supposed sign of someone’s everlasting love. She was still annoyed with him for taking the next clue from Madeleine, annoyed with herself for showing him her sketchbook,

“So what’s the book about?” Tyler asked as she strode on ahead.

“You didn’t read it?”

“I did. All of them. But what’s it really about?”

Emily stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. She ignored the irritated tuts of people who passed her by and tried to think of when it was the book was written, what it was they were doing when her grandmother came up with the idea.

“Judgment,” she said, looking back at him in expectation.

“Prejudice against being poor?”

A quick shake of her head.

“More.” Never judge a book by its cover.

Emily thought back to the day when they had come out of church to see a homeless man propped up against the lych-gate, asleep, with a tiny dog in his lap. So dirty was the poor creature’s fur it was more gray than cream. Emily had hurried past, holding her nose, and her grandmother had scolded her for it, told her she had no idea who he was, what had happened to make him so desperate as to sleep on the streets.