“That’s a silly question,” I say through a forced smile. “I’m in Paris with my dearest friends. Who wouldn’t be thrilled?” They don’t need to know of the panic I’m feeling. I barely understand what my father was talking about. There’s no need to draw them into it yet.

“How’d you hurt your hands?” She nods to where they’re scraped and scabbing over.

“I tripped on a walk this morning.” It’s the truth.

But she must sense I’m distracted, because she narrows her eyes like she doesn’t believe me.

I’ve done my best of putting on a brave face all day, smiling as we strode through the Jardin de Luxembourg after lunch, or picked up baguettes from the bakery across the street.

Everything about Paris feels dreamlike. Like the whole city was painted in watercolors of pale blue and baby pink. They bleed together into rain-soaked lavender. But it’s all left me feeling unmoored, as if I could float right out of my body and up, up, up into the candy floss sky.

After the conversation with my father this morning, I think perhaps I want to. I want to be anyone who isn’t me. Any one of the other millions of people on earth who didn’t accidentally rip the fabric of magic itself.

I tell them I ran into Pascal on my walk this morning. It’s a difficult coincidence to believe in a city of so many, but if Lena and Maxine don’t believe me, they don’t question it to my face. “He’s said he wants us to meet his friends outside the city after a tour of the school. They have some kind of magical community.”

Maxine and Lena shrug together. “That’s fine. Just let me know what shoes to wear,” Maxine says.

The following days pass with strange lurches. Lena spends most of the day in painting lessons, and returns at night with colors caked under her fingernails and light in her eyes. It’s a joy to see her so happy even if I feel on the edge of panic. Maxine and I are left mostly to our own devices and fill our time with shopping and museums and lunches in cute cafés. I end up with a trunk full of new kid gloves and a stack of silk bust-bodices. We take Nina with us sometimes, but seeing the sisters together, bickering and splitting plates of mussels, makes me miss my brother more fiercely than I have in months.

The nights drag on and on. I’m still not sleeping. God, I wish I could sleep.

I haven’t had another dream since the boat, but I can feel one coming, like the drop in barometric pressure right before a storm blows in off the ocean.