Emily wobbled, fell back onto the sofa as she tried to get her brain to put together something vaguely resembling an intelligent response.

“Singing is different.”

“Agnes.” Clementine tugged at her friend’s arm. “Laisse la tranquille.”

“The books are incroyable,” Agnes said with a pout. “But it is wrong to lie if there are no more.”

“You may have lost an idol, someone you admired from afar.” Tyler draped his jacket over Emily’s shoulders and helped her to her feet. “But she lost her grandmother, so leave her alone.”

“It was good to meet you, Emily.” Clementine smiled as she held the door open for them both, gave a small shrug of her shoulders as she glanced back at where Agnes was now sitting on Frederic’s lap.

“Come on, Cinderella,” Tyler said to Emily as they climbed the stairs and he escorted her back through the bar. “Let’s get you home.”

“Home,” Emily mumbled as they stepped outside, and for a second she felt her mood drop back down from where it had been balancing, if only for a little while, precariously close to happy. Then she breathed in the scent of a city she did not know, remembered the sound, the sight, of a group of strangers who had invited her into their world, and it made her smile. A real smile, one that pushed along her scar and beyond, one that made her believe, for the first time, that coming here, with Tyler, wasn’t a mistake.

The moon was low and bright, casting dappled pieces of light on the puddles that had appeared while they were inside, singing about love, loss, and all the fractious hope that Emily had told herself not to believe in. Once more, it was as if she had stepped inside someone else’s life, an existence that didn’t belong to her, that had never before been within her reach. For so long she had assumed that the future she once thought she could have had would never be. Years had passed since she had done anything other than follow a routine, a script of the day-to-day that never changed because it was safe, it was secure. But now she had been shown the other side, seen what was waiting for her if she dared to step through the door and into the secret garden that she had ignored for far too long.

“We could wait for a taxi?” Tyler said as he lit a cigarette, then blew a couple of rings into the sky.

Emily shook her head as she wrapped her arms around herself and looked both ways before crossing the street.

There was something inside of her that seemed to be trying to set itself free. A feeling, or a memory of a feeling, that, up until now, had seemed nothing more than an impossible dream. Emily still couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea she was walking the streets of Paris, with Tyler by her side, away from everything she thought she needed, what she thought was all she could ever have.