Is this what her grandmother had wanted her to find?

She looked up again, began to count the stars that were blinking back from the heavens.

“I’m moving to Nashville.” Tyler was staring at a street performer on the bridge as they passed, a man with a dark, wiry beard and pink cheeks that swelled as he played on a burnished trumpet.

“Why Nashville?” Emily couldn’t think of anything better to say, because she couldn’t figure out why a man who used to trade stocks and shares, making rich people richer, could suddenly decide to pursue a career in country music.

“To collaborate. To breathe it in. To wear it like a favorite jumper, have it cocoon you, nurture you, protect you from all the negativity.”

Just like Catriona had when she came to Paris and met five strangers who became her closest friends.

“There’s a romance to it all,” he said, taking her arm and guiding her across the cobbled street. “Drowning yourself in music, and country has all that heartache, all that pain, wrapped up in such beautiful melodies.”

Emily thought of the notebook he carried around with him. She wondered what was hidden within, and if he would share it with her, the way she had shared her drawings.

The hotel staircase was old and narrow, with a metal cage for a lift that ran up its center. Room 304 had a brass door knocker in the shape of an owl.

A group of owls is called a parliament. Emily looked along the corridor, saw a line of little brass owls, their beaks peeping out from every door. And their ears are asymmetrical so they can pinpoint the exact location of their prey. She began to tap the owl’s head against the door, softly, softly, over and over.

“I’m sorry.” Tyler stood beside her, holding out a key. “About what Agnes said earlier.”

“Forget it,” Emily replied, letting go of the owl to fiddle with the chain of her locket.

“I didn’t want you to find out about that stuff on the Internet.” He was leaning against the door frame, the very tip of his boot touching her shoe.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. It’s not fair that everyone gets to have an opinion on what you’re doing here, when you don’t even know yourself.”

Everyone had an opinion on her, they always did, only now Emily couldn’t ignore it, because if she did, if she gave up and went home, there might not be anything to go back to.

“Good night, Tyler.”

“Good night, Emily,” he said as he leant toward her and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek, but she didn’t flinch, didn’t back away from his touch as she would any other.

He smelled the same. Of leather, hair gel, and mint. It snapped her back to her childhood, up through to the beginning of adolescence and the first time they looked at each other in a different way.

She had been stood in the hall of her old house, ready to go to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park with her hair down and wearing a tea dress made from the deepest green. The doorbell rang, and she opened it, saw him before her in jacket and tie, with hair slicked back and a look of disbelief on his face.