Susan ushered me over to the door back into the DeSantos exhibit and held it open for me.

“I’m glad you’re writing about the exhibit, and I’m really not in any position to turn down free publicity. But please do not try to get into this hallway again,” she warned me as I stepped back through the doorway. Susan pointed toward the far end of the exhibit, where a crowd of people was still gathered. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here, or what you’ve gotten yourself involved in. But in my opinion, you should be much more careful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her. But she had disappeared back into the staff hallway and closed the door.

I did a quick survey of the exhibit space, focusing specifically on the ceiling. Just like Susan had said, there were three cameras dotting the room. I approached the closest one and looked up at it. It looked identical to the one in the staff hallway, and it too had a steadily blinking red light. Susan had said there wasn’t anything suspicious in the video cameras’ footage, but I wasn’t sure that I believed her. There was something strange about the video camera itself, though I wasn’t sure what it was exactly.

Eventually I spotted Bess and George standing near the crowd of people, and I made my way over to them.

“No luck,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out the combination.”

Bess and George turned around to face me, and to my surprise they both looked incredibly worried. George had her brows drawn together, and Bess was fiddling with the ends of her hair.

“Nancy!” said Bess. “Thank God you’re back.”

“What?” I said. “Why do you say that?”

Instead of answering, George just grabbed my hand and began dragging me farther into the crowd of people. “There’s something you need to see,” she said, sounding very serious.

As George and I began making our way through the crowd, I noticed that everyone was turning back to look at me. As soon as they each saw my face, they either pulled away from me, or else leaned over to their neighbor and began pointing at me and whispering.

“George?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

We were at the front of the crowd, and I could finally see what everyone had been looking at. It was another photograph of Shady Oaks in the 1940s, but it wasn’t the one that contained the image of Grace or the one with Jacob. There was someone new trapped within the frozen world of a DeSantos photograph. Me.

CHAPTER EIGHT Overexposure

GEORGE AND BESS WERE STANDING just behind me as I stared at my own face, impossibly walking through the background of an old photograph.

“Is that me?” I asked, even though it clearly was. “How is that possible?”

Bess was next to me and shaking her head.

“That’s what we were asking,” said George. “And you clearly aren’t missing. You’re standing right here.”