“You’ve watched me enough. You know the technique. And you’ve always been able to see beyond the two-dimensional.”

I didn’t tell her how my fingers traced the grooves in the stone walls, how they twitched to pick up a chisel, how they once drew Mille Mots in the dust on the floor of the caves. “I can’t.” A soldier who was never really an artist to begin with, he had no business taking up space on the walls of the cave. He wasn’t the person to leave a memorial behind. “But you could sculpt. You should. You used to be magnificent.”

I thought she’d bristle at the instantly regretted “used to,” but she was pensive today. “I’ve thought about it. After I made those little clay santons for the children at Christmastime, it was like something had been reawakened. I hadn’t sculpted in years, you know.”

“I know.” I looked around Papa’s studio, where she’d moved her tools all those years ago, where there’d always been a block of granite, half roughed out. It was all still there, the block covered over by a dust-choked cloth. “Then why haven’t you?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “It was so long ago. My art was a piece of my past, a piece that I had to put away as I grew up.”

“Papa never asked you to.”

“He didn’t have to.” Her words were steady, but her tweezing became more fierce. “He needed me at the desk, managing things. I knew that. The household needed someone not always lost in a fairy-tale world.”

I turned. “Do you know why I never wanted to enter art school? Why I never sought that future?”

The sunlight touched her graying hair with gold.

“It was because you stepped out of that future and into another. You put art aside in favor of practicality. I grew up watching you make do with Papa’s art rather than make your own. And be happy with it.”

“I was happy.”

“Did Papa and the household need you all that much?”

She stopped and put the flat of her hand against my back. “You needed me.”

“Not anymore.” I caught her hand. “I’m grown. I’m gone. Why not now?”

“You come to me with a back full of splinters, and then you tell me you’re grown and gone.” She took my shoulders and turned me around. “You still need me.”

I’d spent all these months protecting her, hiding from her the dangers I faced every day. Dodging shells and death, and then writing to her about last night’s cabbage soup.

She searched my eyes. “Luc, stay.” Her grip on my shoulders tightened. “I’ll watch you, I’ll hide you, I’ll keep you safe.” Her voice cracked. “Please.”

Instead of answering, I stood and went to the shelf where her old tools waited, shrouded. I took down the bundle, wrapped in soft cloth, and unrolled it on the floor in front of her. A dozen narrow chisels, a mallet, rasps and rifflers. Tools that hadn’t been touched in a decade and a half. She watched them warily.

“Take them up again.” I picked up the slender point chisel and opened up her hand. “In all of this ugliness, you need a weapon. You need to find beauty.”

She closed my fingers around the chisel. “I think perhaps you need it more than I.” Her hand wrapped around mine, around the faded ribbon still tied, and she pinched the inside of my wrist. A silent entreaty to stay safe and do my best. To be a good Crépet.

“I promise, Maman.”

I hadn’t been to Fairbridge since Grandfather fetched me from Mille Mots and brought me to Scotland, those four years ago. We hadn’t stayed long—enough for Grandfather to settle some of Father’s business affairs, to buy an ecstatic supply of Horlicks, and to set me packing up my childhood into a single trunk. By the time I’d set aside my full mourning, we were on our way to Portugal.

Not that I had much of a say in it, but I’d told Luc it was because there was nothing left for me in Perthshire. Really, though, it was another lie. I hadn’t been back home in all that time because I was afraid. Afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk through the house without remembering.

And I did. How could I help it? Every chair I sat in had once held my mother or father. Every rug bore the ghost of their footprints. I drew a finger over the edges of the straight-backed sofas, the inlaid tables, the high, airy bookcases. All modern furniture that Mother brought into the house “to breathe life into things.” The only things Father brought were his heavy desk, burnished black at the edges where he’d rest his elbows while he drew, and the armchair in the corner of his study that he kept just for me, for those moments when I wanted to be near him and his quiet.

But memory can be a fickle thing. Life at Fairbridge wasn’t as warm as my nostalgia. The hallways looked darker than I remembered, the curtains more stifling, the air lethargic. Everything, from the rugs to the furniture to the damask wallpaper, was so neat and solid, things meant to last longer than fashion. All of Mother’s airy modern furniture looked as out of place as she had been. On Father’s desk there was a ring from his ever-present whisky glass. I walked the hallways, past walnut tables and plush stools, wondering how I once found it all beautiful. How had I ever breathed here?

The curiosity room had been left to grow dusty. I pulled back the curtains and blew on the shelves until the air shimmered with motes. Now that I’d traveled so much, I saw many of the items for what they really were. Some were inauthentic, tourists’ fare, the sort of claptrap things sold at train stations and bazaars for people to send home to their granddaughters. Others I now recognized as commonplace—curved acacia seed pods, flamingo feathers, the tiny snail shells that littered the banks of the Senegal River. This room that awed me and comforted me as a child was now little more than a collection of junk. Years ago it had given me a peek of faraway places; now I’d actually been there and seen so much more.

Grandfather felt it, too. I found him in the hallway, fingers laced behind his back, staring at the wall of paintings. “It feels different.” He sighed. “I suppose enough time had passed.”

Though the house was his, he’d spent so little time in it during my childhood. I remembered occasional visits from a near stranger. I was prodded and instructed to call him “Grandfather Muir,” but I scarcely recognized him. On those visits, he spent more time pacing the grounds and sleeping than he did sitting next to me and talking. I knew him now, knew that shyness kept him tongue-tied and that those solitary rambles were where he worked through theories in his head.

“It has been four years, after all.”

Eyes still on the wall, he said, “Forty-seven.”

“Forty-seven?”

The painting he stared at was of a man at a desk, young but wrapped in a jewel-red paisley shawl as he read. Curls of pencil shavings caught in his cuffs and ink stained his fingertips. In the window behind him was a dusty, treeless street.

“Your grandmother painted that. We were in Tangier, newly married.”

“My grandmother?”

He smiled, sadly. “You come by it honestly. She amazed me.”

“She painted others?”

“Many. She sold four of them, you know.” He touched the signature, tucked against the leg of the desk. “She always signed her paintings ‘Alasdair’ instead of ‘Alice,’ so that no one would know she was a woman.”

I looked down the hallway, at paintings I’d grown up seeing yet not really seeing. In each, the little “Alasdair M.” hidden somewhere within the picture. Desert-swept landscapes, crowded marketplaces, doe-eyed women in scarves and veils. All of the things that I’d tried to paint and draw myself. She’d captured Africa.

“You were traveling, even then.”

“A little. Not as much as we wished. She liked Tangier best.”

“That’s what she painted here?”

He traced the curved window in the painting, over the shoulder of his younger self. “We stayed in an old monastery. Alice loved the quiet, the lingering smell of candles, the rusting bell high in the chapel tower. She used to say she could still hear the hymns caught in the stone.”

Some of that mysticism, that hazy overlay of history, infused her paintings. I smiled.

“But when Alice found that she was expecting, she asked to come back to Fairbridge. She teased that she wanted her baby born under a Scottish rain, but I knew she was scared. Almost as if she knew. I lost her when Maud was born. She didn’t have the chance to hold her baby.”

“But you did.” I took his arm and led him backwards to a stool.

“I didn’t know what I was doing.” He ran fingers through his thin hair. “I filled the house with nurses and nannies, tutors and governesses, dancing and drawing masters.” He sighed, as if it wasn’t enough. “Maud saw more of them than of me.”

“She knew you cared.” It seemed to be the right thing to say.

He shrugged. “She was willful and stubborn. She hated that I spent more time with my books than with anything else.”

I’d followed him down the Senegal River. I knew how focused he could be on his books and notes, as focused as Mother always was on her regrets and lost dreams. I also knew that he loved me. Mother had left me behind; Grandfather always kept me by his side.