“Like finding a picture of yourself in someone else’s house.”

Her hand came out of her lap then, holding two photographs, which had been marking the page. He stared.

He stared harder.

“Wait,” he said. “That’s me.”

They were the pictures Marta took on a long-ago day in 1931, when she knocked on the Fiskares’ kitchen door and brought order out of chaos. By sundown, she’d moved into the attic room and had unpacked all her wonderful things, including her camera. When Kennet brought her towels, he stayed to visit. She took his picture.

“Lean against the wall with your shoulder,” she’d said. “And put your hands in your pockets. Now don’t look at me, gaze over toward the window, like you’re thinking deep thoughts.”

Kennet stared at his twelve-year-old self, composed and contemplative. In the second photo, he looked right at the camera, as Marta had told him to.

“When you’re famous, I’ll be able to tell everyone I took your picture.”

“I didn’t know you had these,” he said, barely able to breathe around the words. “How do you have these?”

“Marta sent them.” Astrid held the second picture at arm’s length and moved her head and shoulders side to side. “Your eyes follow. No matter where I stand.”

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t take in the incredible symmetry. All these years of looking at Astrid’s photographs, feeling her gaze follow, feeling she knew him.

All this time, she was doing the same?

Without him even knowing?

Astrid was turning more pages now. Stop, part of Kennet thought. No more. Even as the other part of him begged, More. Tell me more, show me more, don’t ever stop.

She was passing him another picture. An older Kennet in the boathouse. All his weight on one bent leg, the muscles in his arms taut as he wielded a plane above the hull of the Hildur. Looking at the camera, a cigarette held tight in the corner of his mouth. Through the haze of smoke, his expression was wary, as if he’d been startled out of his work.

He’d forgotten the day, but he remembered now. Marta calling him from the boathouse door. Looking up to see her behind the camera. The whirring click. And he laughed at her, chiding, “Never take a gentleman’s picture without his permission.”

“Marta sent me the others,” Astrid said. “I asked for this one. I mean, I asked her to take a picture of you later in life. You were stuck at twelve in the pages of this book. I wanted to see you grown up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Her eyes closed as she shook her head slowly. “I just felt like I knew you.”

“I’m not even smiling in this one.”