“St. Tropez.” Emily tossed the place name over her shoulder, didn’t bother to look to see if he was still following.

“What about it?”

“Next stop.”

“You’re sure?” He glanced at her, then took out his phone, began to tap in a message.

She was sure. Because along with being scolded, Emily had also been reminded by her grandmother of all those summers spent in the South of France when she and her parents had spent their holidays in extravagant villas, feasting on lobster and sipping champagne, while children went to bed with empty bellies and dirty feet. St. Tropez was a town dripping with excess, a town Catriona Robinson had first visited, then lived in, when she herself was poor.

But who’s Antoine? Emily asked once again as she passed by shop windows displaying beautiful things that nobody really needed but someone would buy anyway. Is he who she lived with in St. Tropez?

It was where she had written her first novel, about a woman who fell for the wrong man. A man who could never love her in return, but spent a lifetime trying.

Did she follow Antoine to the south of France? Could he be the man she couldn’t love; could he be Emily’s grandfather?

With tears in her eyes that blurred all she could see, Emily turned her head from side to side, tried to latch onto something that didn’t make her ache with regret, because she had never asked more. She never questioned who her grandmother was, never stopped to think of all she gave up in order to raise her and how everything had changed because she survived.

“If you’re sure, we could get on a train now,” Tyler said, checking timetables on his phone. “To St. Tropez. If you wanted.” He waited for a reply, for a sign that Emily had heard him, but her attention was elsewhere.

There. A little farther up the street. Something familiar. Something she had seen before, but when?

A memory. A smudge in her mind of a memory from when she was still a child; crossing the road wearing brand new red shoes, with buckles on each side that twinkled when they caught the light.

“Where are you going?”

I remember this, Emily thought as she walked toward an art shop with a display of brightly colored découpage parakeets in the window. Some were in mid-flight, with ancient, mismatched keys in their beaks, as if they each held the secret to places of old.

She inhaled deeply as she went inside, wax and oil and parchment flooding her senses. It was like an apothecary’s, with wooden drawers and glass-fronted cabinets lining every wall. Everywhere you looked was color—tubes and tubs and bottles of paint, crayons and pencils and stacks upon stacks of paper.

A corner wall was covered in hundreds of squares of white, each one containing a picture drawn by a child that tickled Emily’s fingers as she looked at them each in turn. A dove, an angel, a bright purple octopus. She remembered her parents thinking she’d gone missing, when in fact she was seated at the top of the shop, by the easels, trying to draw because she’d seen small, square pictures tacked to the walls.