Kant’s shoulders shifted uneasily. “I touched Maria’s neck. Wasn’t entirely cold yet but was close. They must have been gone for hours at that point.”
“Did…” Margot hesitated and wet her lips. She didn’t want to pry too aggressively, knowing the questions would be painful. But at the same time, she needed to know. “Did they look…like…”
His eyes flicked up to meet hers, and Margot had her answer without ever finishing her question.
Yes. Yes, they looked like that.
Kant drank deeply, then put the mug down. He leaned back from the table, the chair’s legs scraping as he reached for the fridge behind them.
A colorful mesh of magnets and papers coated the old, white surface. Kant picked a photo, which he tugged free from a sink-shaped magnet advertising plumbing services.
He placed the photo on the table in front of Margot and turned it to face her. It was old. The left-hand side had been torn, as though it had originally been part of a larger image, and the corners had grown dog-eared and discolored.
A man and a woman smiled out at Margot. The woman leaned against the man, one hand touching his chest, while he held his arm around her back.
Something sharp stung in Margot’s chest. She leaned forward, her arms clutched around her. She felt alarmingly close to collapsing otherwise, as though her body were made up of a Jenga tower of bricks that had been nudged too far.
These are my parents. The image was small and the colors faded, but she hungrily searched the two smiling faces for hints of herself. They were there. Her mother’s hair—she’d cut it short, but the dark curls had been gifted to Margot. So had the dimples on either side of her father’s smile and the high quirk to his eyebrows. The photo was old, but he’d already begun to bald.
My family.
“You wanted to know about them,” Kant said. “We didn’t talk much about our personal lives. Mostly focused on business. But I know they married young and waited some years before having you. And I know they loved each other.”
She was suddenly desperate to not let him see how wet her eyes had become. “Yeah?”
“They both liked working. When things went wrong, Maria would be the first to figure out what needed to be done to fix it.” Kant finished his coffee and pushed the mug aside. His voice, deep and soft, only made the prickling inside Margot’s chest worse. “Hugh loved jokes, both telling them and hearing them. They didn’t have to be especially funny ones. He just liked to laugh.”
Margot clutched at each word, using them to build an image of her parents. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the faces in the photo.