That was why Emily hadn’t bothered to leave a note this morning, to tell him where she was going. Not that he and Phoebe had emerged from their room, even long after breakfast had been tidied away, and she had sat at the table, alone, smiling politely at the waiter when he asked again if anyone would be joining her.

Emily scuffed at a patch of earth in a flowerbed by the gates, watching as an ant scuttled out of sight. She wished she could tunnel into the ground below, become a mole, blind to all she could see, all she had seen.

She didn’t want to see the way they had leant close to one another on the walk back to the hotel, didn’t want to see Phoebe gaze up at him with such longing in her eyes when he asked the man at reception for the keys to their rooms. Nor did she want to see them step out of the lift and turn down the corridor, a last-minute call of good night tossed over their shoulders out of habitual politeness.

Rubbing her fingertips over the nameplate next to the bell that would call forth the person she had been sent to find, Emily screwed her eyes shut, tried to block out the picture of Tyler’s face.

She hated that she could remember, in intricate detail, the first time he had kissed her. A summer’s night, a stolen moment behind the seats of an outdoor theater. When Shakespeare’s words called out to them, and he bent his mouth to hers. They were on the cusp of adulthood, hormones and dappled evening light playing tricks with their hearts. A smile on her lips on the walk home, bumping hips as they went. A hushed good night, then back to her bed where she lay awake, wishing upon wish she could go back and do it all again.

The very next day, when all of life stretched ahead of her, every ounce of happiness from that night was crushed beneath the wheels of a speeding truck.

Do I go in? she thought, looking again at the name on the bell. If she did, nothing would be the same, and everything was already so changed, so altered, from what she was used to, that she wasn’t sure she could handle any more surprises, or disappointments. She was sure Antoine wasn’t her grandfather, and yet a small part of her hoped that he might be, that she was here to find some leftover piece of her family, some smattering of normality, whatever it might be.

The idea to turn around and go home was tempting. But if she went home she would spend the rest of her life wondering what if? Sometimes she loved that nothing ever changed, but sometimes the idea of every single tomorrow being the same became unbearable.

Even if she somehow managed to cobble together a life for herself—Charlie would help her, surely?—Emily knew she would never be able to stop wondering what it was her grandmother had sent her to find, and if Antoine was the key to it all.