“Well,” Kate says. “Let me see.” She is stalling for time, pretending to think, but the way that London is watching her is distracting. It’s as if she is expecting Kate to have all the answers. Kate is not sure what she’s done to convince this girl that she knows what she is doing, or that she is her ally, or that she is in any way qualified to make plans about anything. But somehow she has, and London needs Kate to guide her. This much she can see.

“How do you think we’re going to find him?” London asks, and now Kate is faced with an entirely new task, an entirely new puzzle to solve. Who is “him”? Why are they searching for him? She’s trying to think of the answers, but she’s also trying to keep her eye on the car path. If she ends up in a field again, she might as well call one of her daughters to come and take them home.

—

In Paris, Lydia and Kate stayed at a guest house owned by a woman named Madame Clou, who might as well have been a French Miss Featherton. Again, they spent their days visiting the tourist sites – the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower – but instead of going in, they sat outside and tried to sell Lydia’s sketches. One even slower than typical day as they sat on a bench on the Champs-Élysées, Kate caught Lydia staring at her own reflection in the window of the boulangerie on the other side of the sidewalk. “I’m waiting for the day that I disappear,” Lydia said, and Kate thought back to that day in Brighton, the flash of panic on Lydia’s face when the fortune teller refused to tell her fortune. Kate knew nothing of palm reading, but she also instinctively knew there wasn’t anything in those lines worth getting worked up over. She took Lydia’s hand.

“She was frightened of you,” she said, running her finger over the thick line bisecting Lydia’s palm. “She could tell you have great powers of intuition and instinct, and she knew that if she tried to sell you a line about your fortune, you would call her out as the fraud that she is.”

Lydia let her hand linger in Kate’s as she mulled over her words. Then she smiled. “I think you’re the one with the great power of intuition,” she said. Kate’s stomach tumbled over itself as she became aware of the weight of Lydia’s hand in hers, the heat of her skin, the shape of her wrist as it curved delicately away from her palm.

“I’m hungry,” says London.

Kate squints through the windshield, trying to orient herself, and a sign tells her they are now in Two Harbours. “We could stop at McDonald’s,” she suggests. “There’s one right up here.”