She gave it all up to care for me, Emily thought, and the idea made her feel so incredibly sad and grateful, all at the same time.

“It smells the same.” Tyler scuffed the sand with his feet, disturbing a tiny crab that scuttled back to the sea. “It wasn’t here we came, though, was it?”

“No,” Emily shook her head and pointed a finger west along the coast. She could still picture the villa they always rented: enormous and white, with a pool perched at the edge of a cliff, the water so blue it felt like swimming through a filter. The two families had spent their summers exploring the shoreline on speedboats, lazing by the side of the pool, fattening themselves up on fresh seafood and tarte tatin, all prepared by those brought in to cook, all tidied away by maids with frilly aprons who spoke not a word of English.

Emily watched a fisherman sort his nets and ready his boat for another night on the water.

“Do you remember the year Aunt Cat took us fishing?”

“We dove for oysters,” Emily said with a smile as she remembered being shaken awake before the dawn had broken, cycling down the hill, stretching her legs out either side, squealing as Tyler let go of his handlebars, all of them singing ABBA at the top of their lungs. Feeling so free, so alive, and knowing it was a day she would never, ever forget.

“It was a boat barely big enough for two,” Tyler replied. “But she rowed the three of us out of the harbor, all the way round to a small cove, where a heap of other boats were, all of them empty.”

“Then told us to grab a mask before being the first to jump off the side.”

He was looking at her with amusement, then shook away whatever he was about to say, picked up a stone and examined it quickly before tossing it into the sea, where it skipped and hopped, once, twice more.

“My mother was so angry with her.”

“Why?”

“The smell lingered for days, no matter how hard she scrubbed at my fingers and toes. She even threw my shoes in the bin.”

Emily wondered at what point someone changes. If you’re surrounded by money, at what point do you begin to care for it so? Tyler’s mother was someone who wore her wealth with pride. She went to great lengths to project just the right image to anyone who bothered to look. How much of that affected Tyler and the choices he made? How much of anyone’s life was determined by the family they were born into?

But it never changed the way her grandmother chose to live, even when all the zeroes began to appear on the bank statements and the royalty checks tumbled through the letter box. They could have bought half the village and still had money to spare, or moved back here, to where her grandmother wrote her first ever book, and lived an altogether different kind of life.