Lily laughed softly, the sleepy laugh that was mostly breath. "Mommy. You're making fun of the knight."
"Only a little. He earns it. He's very charming, though. You'll see."
"You sound like you like him."
"I think he's trying very hard," Emma said, "to become someone worth the stumbling."
A long pause. The dishwasher finished its cycle. The house was very quiet now.
"Mommy," Lily murmured. "Begin. Tell me from the beginning."
Emma settled her daughter a little more firmly against her side, pulled the comforter up, and looked at the lighthouse sending its small and faithful beam across the room.
"All right," she said. "From the beginning."
And she began to tell the story of the girl who was not a princess and the knight who took the wrong road and arrived, breathless and ridiculous and entirely unprepared, at exactly the right castle.
It was not the story either of them had expected.
It was, in every way that mattered, better.
Outside, the suburban street was quiet under the May dark. Inside, the lighthouse turned its soft circle, and the little girl in the pink comforter grew gradually, reluctantly still, and the mother's voice went low and steady and warm, the way voices do when they are telling the truth.
The story was beginning.
And somewhere in New York City, entirely unaware of being storied, a young man named Ryan Cole stepped out of a taxi with one duffel bag, forty-three dollars in his wallet, and a dream he had been carrying since he was six years old - a dream he did not yet know was already waiting for him.
And in a gray stone house in Brooklyn, three floors up, a young woman named Vivienne Ashford stood at the window in the very last of the May light and watched the street below and felt, for perhaps the hundredth time that year, the specific and familiar ache of not knowing what came next.
Neither of them knew about the other.
Neither of them knew about the crooked tower, or the wrong turn, or the story that had already started - had, in fact, started years ago in a garden in Connecticut, on an afternoon neither of them quite remembered, when a boy climbed onto a swing and a girl pushed him off it.
"She pushed him?" Lily murmured, faintly, mostly asleep.
Emma smiled in the dark.
"Go to sleep, my love," she said softly. "I'll tell you what happened next."
And she did.
The coffee at Osteria Barista was, objectively speaking, too good for a Tuesday morning. It arrived in small ceramic cups the color of old cream, and it smelled the way Ryan imagined a European vacation might smell - rich and unnecessary and completely unrelated to the life he'd been living until approximately forty-eight hours ago.