They hitchhiked from Brighton to Dover in the cab of a truck and then caught the ferry to Calais, where they met a young Frenchman named Luc with a speech impediment, a trust fund, and a car. He drove them to Paris and dropped them right beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where they sat for hours watching the traffic driving around Place Charles de Gaulle, Lydia using her actually quite-passable French to ask strangers if they wanted her to sketch their portrait. “I never imagined that I would ever be in Paris,” Kate said that night as they wandered the narrow streets of the fourteenth arrondissement, past brightly lit cafés and secretive little alleyways, searching for a place to stay. “I always thought it was like Oz or Never Never Land. One of those places that doesn’t really exist.” She paused, watching a woman with flaming red hair speed by on an equally red moped. “A place that you could only visit if you had an imagination.”

“It is a place you can only visit if you have an imagination,” Lydia said, linking her arm with Kate’s. “And surprise! You’re here.”

London. Of course. How ridiculous that it’s while she’s thinking of Paris that she remembers her granddaughter’s name is London. It’s a name that’s been on Kate’s lips for sixteen years. When Kate named her own daughters, she gave them the most extravagantly beautiful, elaborately luxurious names she could come up with – Veronica and Serafina. How could she have forgotten those, too? When she thinks of those names, Kate pictures angels. But then they had to go and shorten them, extracting syllables as though they could just mould better names from the pieces. Nicki and Finn. Kate is quite sure she never gave birth to a Nicki or a Finn.

“London,” Kate says. “What’s our plan?”

She says this because it might sound as though she knows what is going on – as if she knows their general mission, but not the specifics. It’s funny how clever she is at hiding how dumb she has actually become.

“I don’t know yet,” London says. “I was hoping you could help me come up with one.”

This is not the answer Kate was hoping for. Maybe London doesn’t remember what they are doing either, and is trying to put the ball back into Kate’s court, which is Kate’s tactic: don’t answer anything directly, just lob it back in the most ambiguous way possible so they can’t tell that you don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a trick that Kate has mastered, although it’s not exactly something she’s proud of.