Most of the rest of the photos from that summer were a variation of her, Asher, and Cash, just as she would expect. The three of them and their unbreakable bond. Lacey and Monroe made quick cameos, but Mia sensed their presences offscreen far more than they were captured by a lens. Always the boys’ eyes pulled by the two girls who stood beyond the camera.

If there was a better metaphor for that summer, Mia couldn’t name it.

By the time she got to the Firefly Festival, the annual town-wide event held to celebrate the solstice, Mia had begun to worry she was wasting her time by indulgently sinking into the past. There had been hints of the dynamics she’d remembered—Asher caught up in Monroe, Mia caught up in Cash—but nothing illuminating enough to warrant the hour she’d spent so far sifting through the static memories.

Except that shot of her and Asher dancing. She pushed the thought aside.

Here, here was something else.

The picture, in front of the hot dog stand at the Firefly Festival, was of Jimmy Roarke, Henry Jackson, and Charles Bell. Charles’s arm was wrapped firmly around Jimmy’s shoulders, and both of them had their heads thrown back, laughing.

Those girls were all scared.

That’s what Jimmy had said, with fear in his eyes, his shoulders hunched. The of him had been implied.

But here they were together, Jimmy and Charles, just weeks before the lighthouse night. Their amusement, their comfort with each other, was clearly genuine.

So had something happened to change that?

Or were Jimmy’s memories faulty, distorted? And, if they were, how had they gotten that way?

Her gaze snagged on a picture at the bottom right of the page, distracting her.

The photo had been taken at dusk if not later, the lack of light challenging the capabilities of the rudimentary camera. Mia and Lacey were the main subjects, their tipsy smiles apparent even to Mia now. Lacey had been very pretty when taken on her own, separate from her sister. She’d worn her hair in a cut that had highlighted all the sharp points on her face, but that harshness was softened by her eyes, which were deep blue and lined with classically attractive, sooty lashes.

Both Mia and Lacey presented a different kind of youth than Monroe had. Where Monroe was out of reach, Mia and Lacey were accessible, attainable. There was a pimple erupting just above Mia’s eyebrow, and cheap, too-pink blush smeared in the hollows of Lacey’s cheeks instead of on the ridges. They’d grown into those faces, adulthood realized, whereas Monroe had been left behind, unspoiled.