In the first, a girl in a frilly dress who looked maybe five or six was holding a baby on her lap. The girl’s face was blurry. The baby’s was not.

The second photo contained two parents standing beside a chair where a young, smartly dressed man in his early twenties sat. His face and features were distinctly delineated while those of the couple weren’t.

“What does that mean?” Timothy asked her. “The photos are faked? Altered in some way?”

“On the contrary, it’s evidence that they’re most likely authentic. Back in the days when these pictures were taken, the exposure took so long that, as the people tried to sit still, they couldn’t help but move slightly while the photographs were being taken. That movement would cause the image to blur slightly.”

“So, these people.” He pointed. “The ones you can see clearly, they’re especially good at sitting still?”

“That’s one way to put it, but I wouldn’t want to be in their place.”

“Why is that?”

“They were dead when the photographs were taken.”

“What? Really?”

She couldn’t quite read his tone, but it sounded more shocked than intrigued.

That worried her slightly.

She knew from the information Blake had given her that Timothy had some mental instability, but now a few questions fluttered through her mind, ones that she hadn’t allowed herself to ask earlier: Do you have the wrong man? Did Blake set you up here?

“These photographs were a way of remembering the family members who’d passed away,” she explained. “It was quite normal at the time to have pictures like that taken. When you see an old photo where one person isn’t blurry but the rest are, well, that’s a good indication that the person you can see with the most detail is dead.”

++++

Timothy looked at the photographs.

Life after life.

Death.

After.

Death.

After death.

In each, the living were blurred by their breathing, while the dead sat as still as the staid, languid air in their lungs.

Then the woman clicked to another site.

A warning came up on the screen about the kinds of photographs this website contained, about how you needed to be eighteen in order to enter it, about how it was meant as a private page to help grieving mothers and not to go through the portal unless you agreed to the terms.

As if it’s a true portal, as if you really enter anything. You’re not entering a site, you’re just moving a cursor and tapping a mouse button. Where did this idea ever come from that you can enter a site? You can’t enter a book—there are just images and words. It’s not something you go into, just something you look at. The Internet is the same. A website is a place you enter without going anywhere.