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.

He lifted his cup and looked across the white tablecloth at his cousin.

"To Morgan Group," David said, raising his own cup with the gravity of a man proposing a toast at a state dinner. "And to you, Ryan Cole, who beat ten thousand and change to earn a paycheck there."

"Ten thousand, two hundred and seventeen," Ryan said. "I counted."

"Of course you did."

They drank.

The coffee was outstanding. Ryan put his cup down and allowed himself, for approximately four seconds, to feel something adjacent to happiness. Then he picked the cup back up and drank the rest of it, because four seconds was all he'd budgeted.

The restaurant occupied the ground floor of a Midtown building whose lobby you could only enter if you were already the kind of person who belonged in lobbies like that - or if you were meeting someone who was. David had made the reservation. David had insisted on paying. David was wearing a jacket that cost more than Ryan's first month of rent at the Indiana State dormitory, and he wore it the way men wore jackets when they'd stopped thinking about money.

Ryan wore a jacket that cost forty-two dollars from a consignment shop on Atlantic Avenue, and he wore it like it was worth considerably more, which was a skill he'd developed out of necessity and refined into a habit.

Ten years ago, they'd both been kids in the same dirt-floored mess. Now David Chambers was a senior special assistant at Morgan Group, fifteen years into a contract he'd signed at nineteen, with a wife and a two-bedroom in the West Village and a very good attitude about the hand he'd been dealt. And Ryan - Ryan had just gotten in.

"Okay," Ryan said. "Tell me I'm not dreaming."

"You're not dreaming." David stole a piece of toast from Ryan's plate without asking, which was something he'd been doing since they were eight years old and had never once showed signs of stopping. "I vetted the final list myself. Your name is on it. You start Monday."

"Monday."

"Monday."

Ryan exhaled slowly. Outside the restaurant's tall windows, Midtown Manhattan was doing what Midtown Manhattan did - it moved fast and without apology, a machine with too many parts and no interest in explaining itself. Cabs cut off delivery trucks with the cheerful aggression of people who had decided long ago that the rules of the road were really more of a suggestion. A woman in enormous sunglasses walked a dog the size of a large cat. A man in a suit checked his watch, frowned, and started walking faster.

He'd been watching this city for a week now, ever since he'd signed the lease on the Brooklyn apartment and started figuring out the subway. He was still figuring out the subway. The express trains, specifically, were something he was taking on faith.