Page 97 of The Edge of Always

I think of the door. Choices. I could maybe just look at the building. That would be enough. Maybe.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I tell Emmett.

He nods and then says, ‘We can go to the graveyard in the morning, if you like.’

‘I do like.’ I feel so tired though, and my chest is tight. I think I’d better take Dr Dave’s advice and rest. Which is how I find myself on the giant bed in Emmett’s room, surrounded by a small mountain of food and watching Escape to the Chateau.

It’s like a very vivid depiction of every childhood fantasy I ever had.

It’s comfortable and familiar and I think about how easy it would be to slip back into this. I catch Emmett looking at me from the other side of the bed and wonder if he thinks the same thing. He might. But, as a sudden tightness in my chest steals my breath, I remind myself that I can’t have this. I couldn’t have it then and I can’t have it now.

I can’t have this with Emmett, but I could have art. I could bring art back into my life, however long or short that may be. It’s this thought which makes me reach for my phone, in the darkness of the Parisian night. It’s this thought which makes me scroll to the website of the art studio with the blue door, and it’s this thought which makes me book a place on the life-drawing class.

As I lay back down, I realise that I’m smiling, that I want to have things to look forward to, like I did when I was younger and I felt excited about each summer. I’m not like that anymore, but maybe just for tomorrow I can be.

We’re in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. It was one of the last things that Earl painted, The Juxtaposition of Life and Death.

‘It’s amazing here.’ I spin on the spot, my eyeline in every direction taken up by huge tombs, some decrepit and decaying in a particularly Victorian type of way, others new, with stained-glass windows and pictures of the dead. Everywhere, there are trees. Flowers and grass spring up from the ground, or else force their way through concrete, demanding to be seen.

‘It’s a great cemetery,’ Emmett agrees. He has The Juxtaposition piece up on his phone, seemingly determined that we can find the exact place that Earl painted.

‘This way I think.’ He sets off and we pass through the heart of the cemetery, which is full of people. Some like Emmett, hold their phones ahead of them, others have a map. If there’s a significant person’s tomb, a little cluster of tourists gathers around it. Like Oscar Wilde’s; even though a wall of glass protects it after someone hacked the penis off the angel there, there’s still a massive group of people. One or two of them seem to be weeping.

Needless to say, it takes us an age. Partly because I’m stupidly slow as per, but also because I insist on stopping to look at so many of the tombs.

‘This place is bigger than my actual house,’ I say, peering at a particularly large one covered in moss, which no one is looking at. I wonder how easy it is to get a spot here; maybe Mae could come and chuck some of my ashes in one of the massive family crypts where they must have space. I want the rest of me in the cemetery at home, the same place where Earl is.

It’s a sobering thought, and frankly it’s a testament to the brilliant cemetery that I’ve only just started to think that one day, and soon, people will be walking past my grave, wondering who I was. I see a bad photo of someone stuck to the front of theirs. Mae knows that only great photos are allowed.

I take some pictures for the Deathers.

‘Everything okay, Luna?’ Emmett is ahead of me, holding his phone up to the horizon as if it’s a compass.

I take a breath. ‘Yeah, absolutely fine. How’re you getting on?’

I lose him momentarily as a group of Japanese tourists, all wearing little red caps, cut between us, following a man with a flag.

‘This tree.’ He comes back for me and points to a tree at the front of Earl’s painting; it’s unusual, with a twisty pale trunk. ‘I think it’s over by that far wall. There’s some wall in the background, see.’

It’s not well defined, but there is a wall in Earl’s painting. There’s a sense of perspective; I don’t think the tree is right by the wall.

‘I think it’s just a bit in front of it. Let’s have a look.’

We keep walking, more urgently now that we’re close to the spot Earl painted.

‘It’s there,’ I say, hurrying, in the loosest sense of the term, towards the twisty tree in the distance. ‘What do you think Earl wanted us to realise, by coming here?’

‘I don’t know. But look, that’s it.’

We arrive at the point that’s obviously in the painting. We’re on the outer edges of the cemetery here, and the tombs are much smaller. Normal headstone-sized, almost. It’s quieter here too, away from the other tourists, more peaceful.

‘Do you think Earl was here?’ Emmett asks, and I think he must have been, since he remembered it so well.

‘I think so.’ We stand then, our hands almost touching, and I know that both of us feel closer to Earl than we have done so far. I don’t know what Earl was trying to tell us, if we’re even doing what he instructed when he said the answer is always in the art, but it feels good, being somewhere he was.

‘Look,’ Emmett says, nodding his head towards the gravestone under the tree.

I move closer to get a proper look and I realise then what it says: