I spend some time staring at the box, finishing my cigarette. I have no further taste for bourbon, for some reason. From upstairs comes the creak of floorboards and the murmur of voices, as Olle wakes the children. He’s a good father. I’ve seen him with Doris and Wesley, and he loves his kids, no doubt about that, plays games and offers hugs and all those things. Life is not divided neatly into good people and bad people, good parents and bad parents. We are all of us human and scarred with sin. We make mistakes, some small and some terrible.

But he has drunk two double glasses of fine Kentucky bourbon before breakfast.

I stub out the cigarette and rise. The box can wait.

By the time I’ve got the ankle-biters dressed and fed and delivered safely to the schoolhouse gate, I’m so weary my eyes are crossing. I should go to bed. Instead I pour myself some of Lani’s good, strong coffee, light myself another cigarette, and return to the cardboard box in Olle’s library. Except Olle is already there, asleep on the sofa, and the pictures lie scattered around him.

I pick them up, one by one, and the funny thing is I don’t look at them. I don’t believe I want to know what’s trapped inside these photographs. But I stack them neatly on my lap, and on the very top—I can’t help noticing this—there sits a wedding photograph.

Now, it’s possible I arranged it on purpose, as I picked them up; that I subconsciously sorted these photographs, without really looking, and crowned the whole stack with this one, to be examined first. Weddings are always the most interesting of human events to capture on film, after all. All those people gathered together to witness the union of two people who belong to them, and who will now belong to each other. How do you tell the story of all those individual stories, how do you weave it all together in a single frame?

This one was taken outdoors, probably on the lawn somewhere. In fact, I can’t quite say how I know it’s a wedding, because the bride’s not wearing white, but I do. Her plain, modest dress that might be pale blue or yellow (I have the feeling it’s not pink), and her hat is small and elegant. She’s holding a small bouquet of tropical flowers in one hand, and her other arm is looped over the elbow of her groom, in his neat suit of what must be linen, judging by its rumpled texture. It’s Irene and Olle, of course. Their wedding day, the happiest day of Olle’s life. But they’re not alone.

I lift the photograph and bring it close.