“Their simplicity?” She turned her face to him, saw the sparrow fly up to land on the roof.

“No, birds are anything but simple. Take my friend the flamingo over there.” He pointed to one of the ceramic sculptures wearing a shiny top hat. “Did you know that they are only pink because of a chemical reaction that occurs in their body due to the specific type of algae that they eat?”

“Did you learn that from the same person who taught you about jellyfish?”

Antoine frowned, then opened his mouth wide as he realized what she was referring to. “She told you.”

“I’ve read her diary from that summer.”

“She kept a diary? She never told me, the minx. Am I in it? I suppose I must be.”

“She wrote about why she came here.” Emily realized it was because of Antoine, and Noah, and the way she had felt trapped because of her love for them both.

“I had to hide who I was, for so long.” He looked toward the house, and Emily thought he seemed to be looking back in time, trying to pick up on a memory, a feeling, that was no longer with him. “But I never hid from her. She always accepted people for who they were on the inside, no matter what other people thought.” He seemed sad, as if he too understood what it meant to lose someone special, someone who was his whole world.

“I wish I’d known her back then.”

“She was glorious, simply glorious. My late partner, Jean-Christophe, told me she was the wife I never had. Told me I was an idiot for letting her go.”

Jean-Christophe. Someone who wasn’t there. Emily could sense the absence all around her, saw the memory of him in Antoine’s eyes. She reached out for his hand and he took hers, gave it a gentle squeeze. To touch someone, to bridge that infinite divide, was something so uncharacteristic of her, so unexpected, that she didn’t realize what she had done until he let go and the air around her skin registered what was no longer there.

“I like their freedom.” She looked to the sky, searched out the birds as was so often her go-to, her escape from dealing with what was happening there and then.

“Do you wish you could be free?”

“I don’t even know what it means.”

“Free from this?” He reached out for her scar, then put his hand on her heart. “So much inside, so many scars you don’t let anyone see. No doubt you learnt that from her.”

Emily felt her insides tighten.

“Do you think she ever told Noah how she really felt? Do you think she ever took the leap of faith that was needed to be happy? Even after Margot was born, she refused to ask for help from anyone, even me. Insisted on doing everything by herself. Said she certainly wasn’t going to ask Margot’s father for help.”

Emily took a long sip of her drink, tried to swallow the lump in her throat before speaking. “Noah?”