Still she took off her boots and waded in. The water was colder than she remembered. The walls of the trap broke easily. It didn’t matter anymore, but she couldn’t stop. Plucking one wall after another from the mud, breaking them over her flexed thigh, throwing the pieces as far as she could. Until nothing was left but sticks, scattered across the water. A few floated to the surface, but most of them sank, waterlogged, piled on one another in loose mounds that shone through the reflection of the sky. It wasn’t just broken. It would never be a trap again.

Mara climbed the bank again and sat to catch her breath. The air was cold on her wet feet.

It was only then that she saw it, a glint through dry leaves. Forgotten. A camera, lying by a log, where she had once put it down and never picked it up again.

The last time they used it was the day that she and Ashley caught their first fish. A lifetime ago. She couldn’t believe it was still there. As if it were waiting for her.

She picked up the camera and pressed the power button, but it didn’t respond.

Batteries.

She took the batteries from her headlamp and put them in the camera. This time, when she pressed the button, the camera whirred awake in her hands.

Now Mara hesitated. She knew what she was looking for. She just wasn’t sure if she was ready.

She pressed replay.

There was Ashley. Her face on the small screen, so round that Mara barely recognized it. She had forgotten that Ashley’s face was once round, and even now, when she closed her eyes, she couldn’t picture it that way, not until she opened them again and that full face smiled from the screen before her. Hair cascading and eyes crinkled as she pursed her lips, waiting to talk.

“What do you think?” said Ashley, posing before the camera.

And Mara’s voice, from beyond the frame. “You look beautiful. Not for being out here. For anywhere.”

“It’s not too much?” She touched the flower by her ear.

“Not at all. You’re perfect.”

A hesitation. And that was when Mara saw something she had never noticed before, not when she was too nervous to look at Ashley head-on, when she could only stare down at the screen in her hands, at a sun less blinding in miniature.

In this, the video that would secure her triumph, Ashley wasn’t talking to the lens. Not performing for the camera, for the endless audience. She smiled right past it. She was smiling at Mara. And Mara, looking down, hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t seen it at all.

“Well,” said Ashley. “It’s time to check the fish trap. Let’s see if there’s anything there. Follow me.”

The camera followed; on-screen, Mara’s sandaled feet followed; in Mara’s mind, she followed Ashley now, too. How Ashley turned and rushed down the hill, almost skipping. Glancing back with a grin, the spark in her eyes. And when she saw the trap, she pointed, but she wasn’t looking at the fish. She was looking at Mara still.