She met my eyes. “Are you terrified to fly again?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Just a smidge.”

Kit leaned over. “Remember that time we went to Hawaii—and you lived?”

“We all lived, as I recall,” my mother said.

“Would you like me to distract you?” Kit asked, nodding as she said it to let me know that Yes, I absolutely would.

My hands were turning kind of a bloodless gray. “I really can’t imagine any possible way you could do that.”

Kit wiggled her eyebrows at me. “I can.”

The engines were whirring into action. Our seats faced each other. I leaned forward. “How?”

She met my mother’s eyes and gave her a little nod, like they shared a yummy secret. My mom fished around in her carry-on and pulled out a little wrapped box that I recognized instantly. It was Ian’s birthday present to me.

“Hey,” I said. “I threw that in the kitchen trash.”

“I fished it back out,” my mom said.

I stared at it.

“Do you want it?” she finally asked.

The captain was making final announcements over the loudspeaker. I nodded.

She handed it over, and I peeled off the paper and the tape. Then I lifted the lid off the box. Inside was a necklace—a delicate silver chain attached to each end of a small silver bar, and stamped into the bar, in tiny typewriter-like letters, was one word: Courage.

“What is it?” Kit asked.

“A necklace.”

“What does it say?” my mom asked.

“Courage.”

Kit and my mom looked at each other. “Well,” my mom said, “aren’t we glad I rescued it?”

As I fastened it behind my neck and felt the cool pressure of the silver bar against my breastbone, the plane started to back away from the gate.

I felt a surge of fear.

“I’ve got another distraction for you,” Kit said, watching me. “A better one.”

“What?”

“The address Rob got you for Ian is wrong.”

Okay. That was distracting. “Wrong?”

She nodded. “That’s his parents’ address in Edinburgh, but he doesn’t live there.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

She gave me a mysterious I’ve got so much to tell you smile. “We’re in touch.”

I felt an anxious jolt of Where is this going? What could she possibly tell me that was that juicy? Without permission, my brain jumped to a worst-case scenario. “Please don’t tell me you are dating Ian,” I said.

“What? No! Gross! I’m back with Fat Benjamin.”

“Why on earth would you be in touch with Ian?”

That smile again. “He found me online. He wanted to know how you were doing.”

The plane stopped a second, then started rolling forward. “He did? When was this?”

“A few weeks after I went back. He asked if he could check in with me from time to time.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He asked me not to. He didn’t want to freak you out.”

I tried to absorb the idea. “Did he? Check in?”

She nodded. “He did indeed.”

Off her tone, I said, “A lot?”

“About once a week.”

“Once a week!” She was enjoying this reveal too much. “He called you?”

“Mostly just email. Also, you know all those articles I sent you?”

The plane sped up on the runway. “The ones I’m pretty sure you never read?”

“They were from him.”

He’d sent the articles! That explained a lot. But why? “How did he sound?”

“Like a concerned professional.”

“Did you ever talk about anything else?”

She shook her head. “Mostly just your health. Pretty dry.”

The nose of the plane lifted. I nodded. “Okay.”

“But my personal opinion? He still likes you.”

“He never liked me.”

“I disagree.”

“He told me in no uncertain terms,” I said. “He never liked me. It was all just me being delusional, and he let it go on so I’d have, you know, a reason to live. Trust me. If there were any possibility for hope, I’d have found it.”

Kit shrugged, like, Okay. Have it your way. The plane left the ground now, rattling and shuddering as it rose. I touched my fingers to my necklace. Courage.

Kit said, “There is one other thing, though.”

I looked up.

“He started following me on Instagram.”

I took in a breath. “Is that why you always take a million pictures of me?”

She nodded, looking very pleased with herself. “And guess what else? He’s never posted a picture, and he doesn’t follow anyone else. He doesn’t even have a profile pic. I am the one person he follows.”

I tried to process the idea of Ian using Instagram. “He saw the picture you took of my scars?”

Kit nodded very slowly.

“And the one this morning in the airport?”

Kit nodded again. “Assuming he checks his phone.”

“So he might know we’re headed to Europe.”

“He might.”

“So much for a stealth attack.”

“The upside is,” Kit went on, “it makes it easier to find out where he lives.”

“How so?”

“When we get to Scotland,” Kit said, shrugging, “we’ll just message him for his address.”

I nodded at her. “It’s almost too simple.”

Kit patted me on the head. “Almost.”

*

EVEN BEYOND THE white terror of flying, I was nervous about the travel in general. At home, I’d developed routines and ways of doing things that had lifted my confidence. In Europe, I had no idea what to expect. We had researched everything online, of course, and I had a folder of printouts in my carry-on bag. You can call ahead for a ramp to help you board the train from Brussels to Bruges, for example, but you can’t just show up and demand one. I’d also made sure to find a hotel with rooms on the ground floor I could get to. Kit had wanted us to take a boat tour around the canals, but we learned in advance that none of the boats in town could accommodate wheelchairs.

We were as prepared as we could be, but nothing could have prepared us for the actual experience of being in Bruges. It was like a fairy-tale city. None of the normal twenty-first-century clutter, like neon signs or billboards. Just medieval stone and brick buildings with turrets and gables, a town square with a Gothic church, and chocolate shops, and cobblestone streets. And the canals! Every few blocks, stone bridges arched over the quiet water below.

Not to mention all the swans.

All my prep was worth it. There were tricky moments of travel—like when we boarded the train and found it packed with people, shoulder to shoulder—so full, folks had to move to the next car to make room for us, and Kitty sat on my lap in the chair to make space. But, in general, it wasn’t as hard as I’d feared. I’d expected roadblock after roadblock, and humiliation after humiliation, as I tried to navigate a world set up for able-bodied, French-and-or-Flemish-speaking foreigners. But we got along with surprising ease.

We reached the hotel in the late morning, and our jet-lag guide said we only had to stay awake until 10:00 P.M., so we ordered room service—steak frites—and watched European TV. Before it got too late, Kit and my mom popped out to raid the chocolate shops, and came back with a full shopping bag of dark, milk, white, peppermint, and salted caramel chocolates in every shape under the sun, from hearts to starfish, and filled with creams and nougats, fruit purees, coffee, almonds, macadamias, and peanut butter.

Kit dumped it all out on her bed in a pile.

“You’ve lost your marbles,” I said to them both. “We can’t eat all that.”

“Sure we can,” Kit said.

“We’ll get sick,” I insisted.

“Not me,” Kit said. “I’ve spent years building up a tolerance.”

In the end, we ate it all. The more we ate, the more it felt like a challenge we had to win. We really did make ourselves sick. It was impressive debauchery. Afterward, my mom and I had to lie green-gilled on the bed, and Kit threw up in the bathroom.

“I think I’m just dehydrated,” she said, climbing into her rollaway bed by the window.

But in the morning, Kit was sick again.

“Maybe I picked up dysentery in the airport,” she said. The nausea got better by midday. By evening, Kit was exhausted—but luckily nothing worse.

When it was time to get dressed, Kit lay on her rollaway like a corpse.

“You’re fine now,” I tried to insist, as she adjusted the cool rag over her eyes. “You haven’t barfed in four hours. You and Mom need to get going.”

But Kit, her voice froggy, didn’t open her eyes. “I don’t think I’m going.”

“Um,” I said. “You have to go! This was your crazy idea!”

“I do not feel good at all,” Kit said.

My mom clutched her purse. “Maybe we should just skip it,” she suggested.

“You’re not skipping,” Kit said.

“Well, I’m not going by myself,” my mom said.

“Mags can go with you.”

“I wasn’t invited,” I said.

“Go as me,” Kit said. “We RSVP’d for three.”

“But they don’t want me there.”

“Nonsense,” my mother said. “It was an oversight.”