I sat at the table and turned the pages of the album. The sweat on my fingertips made them slip on the plastic sleeves. All of the photographs were from the Center. They looked like they had been taken with disposable cameras and developed imperfectly, at a gas station or similar. There were multiple close-ups of plants with Luke’s thumb in the shot for scale. (That thumb—the sight of it made my spine tingle.) There was a photo of the Sweet Sorrows and another of the koi pond. There was a snapshot of a visiting monk, his head brown and smooth as a nut; a tall man I didn’t recognize was pushing a big white envelope into his stomach, somewhat missing the monk’s helpless hands. There was a whole page of Dominiques, here standing in front of the sunset, here laughing and looking over her shoulder. A few had been taken in the shrine room, meditating girls from summers past; I could pick out a familiar face or two. Not for the first time that summer, I felt a strange bruised tenderness, a nostalgia for the current moment.

Then I saw it. It was a picture of the grounds, of nothing, really: a few scattered adults standing around. But a man I recognized sat on one of the Center’s trademark white boulders, his head turned slightly away from the lens. The photograph couldn’t have been taken more than a year ago. His hair was the same length it had been on the last day I’d seen him. There was a strange woman standing by his side. Her hand was on his shoulder. His feet were raised off the ground.

“Did you find him?” Luke asked.

I pressed my finger into my father’s face. When I took it away, nothing had changed. Father, woman, boulder, feet. I felt the room contract around me.

“I want you to be careful,” Luke said. “It wasn’t just the nettles that made Milarepa levitate, you know.”

“I know,” I said. The feet in the photo seemed significant to me. I recognized the boulder he was sitting on. I had sat on it myself. My thighs burned at the thought. It’s strange, the importance we assign to handling things our loved ones have touched, or to revisiting historic scenes, of epic battles or first dates. To sleeping in Lizzie Borden’s bedroom. These are attempts at folding time, at pinning one piece of fabric to another. But time doesn’t work that way, you know. That’s why you feel so empty afterward.

“I don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

“Who is she?” I asked.

Luke wiped his hands on a towel and came toward me. He reached out as if to tuck my hair behind my ear, then pulled his hand away at the last moment and put it in his pocket.