“And now?”

“Let’s just say Daddy dearest doesn’t approve of my life choices.”

Emily recalled her grandmother telling her Tyler had lost his job. Something about an extramarital affair and recreational drug use. She remembered thinking it couldn’t have been easy for him to tell his parents and wondered what made him throw away his career, or in fact why he had decided to stay for years in a life that clearly didn’t make him happy.

She felt sorry for him, and this surprised her. For so long she had hated all those letters from his mother that told of how he had been chosen as head boy, become captain of the swim squad, won a place at Cambridge. Emily would scoff and pretend not to care when she heard of how he had traveled all over the world, climbed mountains, and swum with creatures of the sea. More than anything, she resented him for making her so incredibly envious of what she once thought could have been her life too.

“You hated it.”

Tyler nodded in reply. “All of it. The drugs, the affair, it wasn’t me, it was the lifestyle I pushed myself into, without actually wanting it. That’s what pisses him off more than anything, the fact I don’t want to be like him.”

His face was closed, shutting away the rest of his response behind a door. But there was a crack, a clue in the way he fiddled with his fork at the table, tapping it against his glass, letting the note sing out. Emily imagined bubbles of sound, inside of which were all his secrets, all his pain. Bubbles that floated through and over Paris until they burst amongst the clouds.

“The first time I heard Johnny Cash play,” he said as he called the waiter over to pay their bill.

“Sorry?”

“I remember it so clearly. We were driving back from my grandparents’ and ‘Ring of Fire’ came on the radio. It was a physical reaction. My entire body sat a little straighter and I asked my mum to turn it up.” He looked across at his guitar. “All at once I knew what it was I wanted to do.”

He had been given a guitar one Christmas. Emily remembered his excitement that year, perched on the end of his bed and asking her if she thought that even if you no longer believed in Father Christmas, would you get what you hoped for most of all? They were so young, so full of hope. It was the last Christmas Emily ever dared to wish for something, the last time she still believed there was magic in the world.

“Have you ever felt that way about something?” He put some money on the table, pushed back his chair then came around to hold hers out as she stood.

Emily smiled as the cover of a favorite book floated into her mind.

“Matilda.”

“Who?”

“By Roald Dahl.” It was one of the first books she had ever read by herself, in her head, without help from anyone to decipher all the words. It had made her truly understand the power of those words, how they could transport you to another world. More than that, the sketches of that tiny, little girl had made her want to draw all the pictures she had carried around in her mind for as long as she could remember.