“Which is what I’ve been doing for the past five years,” Leora joked, and immediately regretted it. She had wanted him to say more, but she had changed the mood. The conversation trailed off into jokes about food and cooking. But after Jake retreated to the kitchen—she was once again banned from the kitchen while he was cleaning up—she stepped back toward the bookcase again. That was when she noticed, on one of the middle shelves in a space between some history books, a framed picture of a young woman and a little boy.

The woman, a dark-haired, broad-shouldered woman who looked about five or ten years older than Leora, was holding the boy, who looked about seven years old and had a huge head of dark curly hair and brown eyes that seemed to take up half his face. The woman had both arms around the boy, though he was too big to sit on her lap. He was seated next to her on a lime green couch, one arm around her shoulders. The boy grinned in pure earnest, oblivious to the way his arm slung high around the woman’s neck made it look like he thought of her as a school friend; the woman, meanwhile, smiled a much more canny smile, but still seemed on the verge of laughing at the boy, almost winking at whoever was behind the camera. It was the woman in the picture that drew Leora’s stare. The closeness of their ages—the woman’s and Leora’s—caught her attention, and the woman’s smile, her half wink at the camera, made Leora feel almost as if they were old friends sharing a secret. There seemed to be some sort of promise hidden in the picture, a forecast of future happiness that comes only from being young and loved.

Leora heard the water being turned off at the kitchen sink behind her, the last clean plate clanking into place. Jake turned around to join her where she was standing. He had taken off his glasses for a moment and was cleaning them on the corner of his shirt, unaware that she was watching him. When he looked up, his eyes—which she had never seen unmasked by glasses—were the eyes in the photograph. He turned her to face him and began kissing her, collapsing with her on the sofa across from the bookcase. And since then she hadn’t been able to sleep.