After he asked the question, he glanced at Anna, dreading the empty look in her eyes as she faced the screen. But to his shock, he saw her watching the screen, genuinely seeing it, her eyebrows raised above her glasses as she leaned forward on the couch as if she had come back to life. Following her gaze, he turned toward the screen himself.

It was blank.

Bill stared for a moment at the empty screen, feeling like he was staring into a pool of opaque water. The whir of the projector’s fan made the blank screen seem to vibrate slightly. There was a mistake, he knew. He must have lined up the slides wrong in the carousel, though he was always careful not to leave gaps. He clicked to the next slide.

Blank.

He clicked again. A picture of himself and Anna came up on the screen, arm in arm, she half laughing. Bill sighed with relief. But when he looked at the list of captions, he saw “Anna and me” listed as slide number four, which was exactly where it was on the carousel. There was no mistake. Slide number three, according to the list, had been “Me and the birthday girl.”

He clicked again, to slide number five, listed as “Ben hauls in the presents,” and Ben appeared in full force on the screen—a much bigger, older Ben than the one who had been feeding the ducks in the last reel—making a fake grimace under a pile of little wrapped gifts that couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds. Then he clicked to what should have been slide number five, “Anna and Naomi and me.”

Blank.

Now Bill leaned over to stare at the slide carousel itself on the machine and saw that it had been pillaged. Nearly half the slides were missing. He counted slides with his fingertips, following along on the caption sheets. Number seven was missing—“Naomi and friends”—as was number eight, “Naomi and friends, again,” and number ten, “The birthday girl, with Mom and Dad.” Numbers fourteen through eighteen, inclusive—“Make a wish: Candles and cake!”—had vanished without a trace, not to mention numbers twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five, all labeled “The birthday girl opens the gifts!” Bill clicked through the entire carousel like cannon fire, one after another. Every picture of Naomi was gone.

Anna was seated on the couch, leaning forward, a strange smile on her face. Bill glanced over at her and was struck by her expression. He felt her presence in a way he hadn’t felt it in a very long time, since her mind had begun to fade. He reached for her hand. But then suddenly something occurred to him.

“Did you do something with these slides, Anna?” he asked.