I take the photo out and tuck it in my pocket. I reach up and touch the knot on my head. Is it all a dream? Is it all a memory? Will I wake up soon, in my bed in our small city, or perhaps even longer ago? Maybe I’ll wake up and Mary will still be here, John will still be a baby, and life will somehow be back to the way I had always imagined it would go.

I slide the notebook back into the empty spot and grab the previous one, also from that summer but earlier, with photos of Mary clearly pregnant. As I page through, I notice a shift in the style of photos, as if someone else was behind the shutter. The pictures I had seen from later in the summer caught us all from a distance, and there were usually two or three of us in the photo, Shirley normally missing since she was taking the photos. But this album is different.

This album contains almost exclusively photos of Mary.

There are photos of her from far away as she stood at the end of the pier holding her swollen stomach. There are photos of her sitting on the sofa in the cabin, her legs crossed beneath her, staring through windows lit by the sun. There are photos of her asleep on the deck, and I remember how restless she became in those final weeks, how at night she slipped from the bed and wandered the cabin, sometimes pacing the kitchen, worried about the impending labor, too uncomfortable to sleep.

The thing about these photos is that they are beautiful, well taken by someone who clearly had an eye for how to frame a shot, how to catch that intangible thing that skilled photographers will sometimes capture. What first appears as a stray line of light is crucial to the image. Nothing is accidental.

Who took these intimate photos of your grandmother? It wasn’t Shirley.

Could it have been Tom? It had to have been. There was no one else there.

I hear a door slam somewhere down the hallway, and it scares me worse than a gunshot. I close the notebook gently and slide it back into the vacant spot on the shelf.

Was It You?

I race over and switch off the storage room’s light, feeling embarrassed that I’m snooping around and hoping Tom doesn’t come into the room. The door is still open about an inch, and a blade of light from the hallway shines in. I look through the crack and into the hall. As far as I can tell, it’s empty. It must have been Tom, right? Who else would be wandering through the house at this hour?

I take a deep breath.

I open the door, walk through, and close it behind me.

I exhale.

As I’m about to climb the stairs, I hear it again—another door slams. I look quickly over my shoulder and see a shadow vanish around the corner at the far end of the hall, the direction I came from. I pause, consider going on my way, following the stairs up to wherever they might lead, but my curiosity gets the better of me, and I jog the long length of the hallway and follow whoever raced around the corner.