I don’t even think I’m that good at photography. My way of framing photos in my brain is too fantastical to be professional or skillful. I haven’t won any contests. But I enjoy it. Since I started taking pictures last year, I made a rule that I could only take one photo of a subject at a time. A lot of YouTube videos I watched discourage this, telling new photographers to take as many shots as they can and to sift through and find the good ones later.

But I don’t want every photo to be good; I want them to be real. I want to capture the exact moment where I stood and observed something about the world and thought it worth documenting in all of its crooked, imperfect glory. I want to catch myself by surprise, and the only way I know how to do that is to point the lens and snap what I see before me.

Once.

This trip is going to be a photograph. One snap, one chance, to figure out why and how Jenna sent that book, to put the loss of her far enough behind me that I can move on and do everything she wanted us to do, everything her parents expect me to do.

It’s what Jenna would want.

chapter six

“Turn around. Turn around, when possible.”

I’m trying not to take the squawking GPS that came with my airport rental car as a bad omen, but it’s difficult when, no matter which way I turn, it tells me I’m going the wrong way.

Jenna is probably laughing at me, or watching me with her patented look of aggravation.

Somehow, I keep missing the elusive turn for Lochbrook from the main highway. It reminds me a little of Orman, actually, of how Emmeline and Ainsley have to walk past the entrance to the forest a certain number of times, the trees spreading apart to let them through only after the required number of passes have been made.

I must be right—or this navigation system is faulty—because as I take an exit I tried ten minutes ago, the voice happily chirps, “In twenty miles, your destination will be on your left.”

Maybe this is all part of the balance thing, paying the piper for the ease with which I got through the airport and onto my plane. They make it remarkably easy to know where to go—there are signs everywhere—though you wouldn’t have known this from Mark’s level of worrying.

When he and Trisha dropped me off, he told me at least five times to call if I had any trouble finding the gate, and Trisha said, “Amelia and Jenna went to California by themselves, Mark,” and he said, “Yes, but Jenna isn’t here,” and then we all stood there looking at our shoes while Mark cried and Trisha pinched the bridge of her nose.