As he flipped the pages, he noticed something odd about the photographs. Unsmiling eyes looked everywhere but at the camera. It was as if they’d been taken the split second before the subject knew the camera was there. One of Gramps’s friends—a man in his sixties who had delivered a reading at the funeral—lunged to block a computer screen with his hand. Another friend; the curl of cigarette smoke emerged from behind her back.

These photos were poor quality and embarrassing. Why put them in an album?

Daniel turned another page. There was Gramps’s friend Garth, a gray woolen beanie jammed down on escaping wisps of gray hair, a bushy unkempt beard, punctuated by a pained grin full of teeth that looked like a vandalized graveyard. He leaned against a shuttered door in a bleak back alley, forlorn eyes pleading with the night sky. But Garth had spoken at the funeral, clean-shaven and resplendent in a striped woolen vest and crisp white shirt. Daniel was sure he didn’t live on the streets.

Another page. Gramps sat in his beloved burgundy recliner—although it was now a dull, dirty pink—smiling as he tore up a betting slip. A sad revelation washed over Daniel as the pieces locked into place. He often quizzed Gramps on his lack of money and meager possessions, and now he knew why. Gramps never mentioned he was a gambler. But why get someone to take a photo of it?

Another page, and his own face appeared, pain and frustration on display in crisp color. He sat at one end of the couch in his expansive living room, tight arms folded across his chest, white and pink balloons floating at his shoulder. Kelly sat at the other end of the couch, overdressed for a child’s party, blond hair styled to perfection. As usual. Under her outstretched painted nails was . . . a pill bottle? It sat on a sheet of paper as Kelly threw a furtive glance over her shoulder at him, her brown eyes wide.

On the next page of the tiny album, the same photo. Why would Gramps have two copies? But no, this one was different. While Kelly’s fingers still splayed over white plastic, in this one Daniel’s face beamed at someone off camera, his anger gone. Daniel’s professional radar pinged. He should have been seen enjoying his own daughter’s birthday party, not fuming at his wife while happy to see other people. He prided himself on his poker face. It was a professional necessity when a conga line of excuses rolled out from the couples who sat opposite him on the couch in his office, giving lame reasons for selfish choices or justifications to wallpaper over guilt. Before he advised them that the best thing to do was to be honest with each other and keep no secrets.