Thirteen years old and on the cusp of a life most extraordinary. Two children still to grow into adults, catching a glimpse of how they were changing into something more.

He pulled back and looked at her in the exact same way as he did that summer night, fifteen years ago, as if he was only seeing her then for the first time, looking beyond the scar and all the damage her body had endured.

For a second, for just a fraction of a moment, Emily forgot all about the absolute bombshell her grandmother had dropped. But as he walked away and she closed the door to her room, Emily realized she felt a little disappointed; that somehow he had managed to brighten her mood, and without him all seemed duller, less interesting, than before.

So she did what she always did when the pain began to creep close: she sat by the window, opened it wide to breathe in the night, slipped on the borrowed headphones, and began to draw. But this time the lines that appeared were of someone new. A man who ambled as he walked, a guitar thrown over one shoulder and a curl of hair at the nape of his neck.

She drew him in the middle of a field draped in midnight, with trees that turned to listen as he played. A long line of notes escaping from strings gently plucked. Notes that flew up and over his head, one by one transforming into a swarm, a miasma, of hundreds and hundreds of birds on the wing.

12

BLUEBIRD

Sialia

The woman sat across from Emily wore her face like an apology for getting old. She was stirring her coffee and eating tiny forkfuls of cake, waiting for Emily to finish reading another excerpt from her grandmother’s past. Emily herself was trying to ignore the symphony of accents coming from the other side of the café, from where a group of six people was huddled around a table, discussing the previous night’s adventures in broken English, one of whom had a dark bob.

Agnes was part of the current clutch of hipster twenty-somethings living out their literary fantasies by sleeping in the upstairs library next door—apart from when they were exploring the delights of Paris, and one another, from what Emily could make out, on a summer’s night just gone. It made her jealous, to think of all that life they still had yet to live, that someone like Agnes was following in her grandmother’s footsteps when Emily had never had the chance to do so herself.

“Catriona used to write to my mother, even when she no longer ran the shop.” Madeleine was staring at Emily’s scar. She could feel those eyes on her as she carefully folded her grandmother’s words, tucked them away inside her bag. “She used to send us an advance copy of all her books, even the ones from before she was famous.”