Angela’s apartment building is neighbor to a grocer’s stand and faces the sprawling expanse of the city block. Along a narrow street opposite the metro stop, a farmers’ market is underway. Friends kiss each other’s cheeks as they pause—more shoppers than I’ve ever seen at a San Diego market—enjoying the atmosphere, probably making lasting, happy memories. The sweeping melody of an accordion intones the charming soundtrack Paris is known for and makes me grind my teeth.

I set down my duffel bag before the austere wooden entrance to Angela’s building. Thanks to a trip to France we took as a family, I recall Montmartre was the center of Parisian street art about a century ago. Artists splay in chairs beside colorful tableaus or black-and-white photographs every five feet.

I like art—the kind diagramming nervous systems and the human body, sketches from the eighteenth century. Not the kind delineating hopes and desires. Abstract art and the indefinable have always seemed like a waste of time to me.

Give me reason. Give me finite.

Not Angela. My twin sister’s uncanny ability to zero in on whatever bleeding heart was nearest in the room was a running joke in our family. We would say she could hear a fly being swatted two houses down. She loved the emotions and complexity of a moment, whether in art, books, or a chubby child’s glance at a passing ice cream truck.

Once I was reading on the back porch and heard her crying. I set down my dinosaur book and found Angela inside our tree house giving a memorial service for a butterfly whose wings she’d accidentally torn off. Not knowing what to do, I hugged her and told her we could bury the insect like a dinosaur. Then someone would find its fossil one day. We used the box from my new microscope as the coffin and a sheet of newspaper for a cushion, not yet understanding the process of fossilization.

The call box of her building displays her name—DARBY ANGELA—and every cell in my body seems to draw another stupid, shocked breath that this is happening. I press her button. In spite of myself, I imagine her light cadence answering: Good day, Moon.

Tears well in my eyes, seeing her so clearly I could pull her from my thoughts. I lean into the metal bars—cool on the sudden flush that heats my cheek—while my knees bang against the wrought iron gate of the glass entryway. Sobs climb my throat, clawing to air the pain that balls my fists, when a man, late twenties, appears, standing behind the glass. Startled, I step back as he opens the door; his tall frame barely fits within the shadowy entry.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle.” Dark hair is parted meticulously to the side. “Shayna?”