On the opposite wall to all those notebooks hung a small, square picture of two bluebirds. It was so very different in style to all the other paintings in the house, but Emily had never asked where it came from, or why it was right next to the space where her grandmother always worked. It was just one example of how Emily had simply assumed, in that slightly arrogant way of a child, that adults had no real past before their children were born. Now, more than anything, she wanted to be able to talk to her grandmother, to discover everything that had happened before.

Emily went over to the mantelpiece, looking at each of the photographs stood on top. She wished she could go back, find at least one answer to all her questions.

For years, Emily had allowed her life to be decided for her, first by a long series of doctors and then her grandmother. It was always Catriona to whom she had turned whenever she was in need, relied on to make all the decisions, allowed to take responsibility for pretty much every aspect of her life. It wasn’t until Catriona had decided to forgo further treatment that Emily was forced to acknowledge how isolated, how dependent on her grandmother, she had become.

Emily looked across at the piles of letters she had created, thought of what would happen to all those words if she were to set them alight. Imagined them dancing up the chimney and into the sky, where they would mix together and perhaps create something new, or get caught in the beak of a passing cockatoo who would fly across the ocean and deliver them to a boy who dreamt of one day growing up to be a famous author.

“What am I supposed to do?” Emily sighed as she sank to her knees and looked across at her grandmother’s desk, where an ancient typewriter had sat, untouched for months. Twenty-eight years old with nothing to show for her life other than a shelf full of books. What was she, who was she, without the late, great Catriona Robinson?

2

ROBIN

Erithacus rubecula

Mr. Thomas could see someone moving around inside the house as he approached. The outline of a person who dipped and turned beyond the window. The house itself was tucked away at the end of a long gravel path next to the church. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sign for Meadows Cottage written in the same hand as that on the envelope he’d been instructed to deliver by the woman whose absence he felt each morning when he woke.

It was his dog Max who’d first brought them together, just shy of one year ago. Max was running in circles around a pile of belongings, tail thumping in contentment as his bark resonated through the morning air. There had ensued a momentary tug of war as he’d retrieved one end of a belt from Max’s jaws, then he’d crouched down to discover a small gold ring half buried in the sand beside a pile of clothes now wrinkled through with sandy paw prints. He had turned full circle in search of another person, and found a woman jogging toward him, breathless but smiling, with hair slapped in sodden streaks over her face. She was wearing nothing more than a silk slip, soaked through by her swim in the sea. She’d apologized for the confusion, laughing about how it must have seemed to a man who was simply walking his dog and discovered a pile of abandoned belongings.