I pause. “Interesting.”

“Interesting?”

I’m not sure how much to tell him. How comfortable will he be with me sneaking around his house, exploring the rooms he never showed to you and me? To be honest, it wasn’t completely deliberate—most of it was simply the result of me getting lost. I decide to start there.

“I actually got lost in the house. It’s quite a place you have.”

He chuckles. “You should start leaving a trail of bread crumbs.”

Bats swoop down into the low light, flickering here and there, barely missing our heads. I decide to tell him.

“Tom, it was completely by accident, but I found myself in the long hallway in the basement. I happened to open one of the doors, trying to find my way back, and I ended up in the room with all the photo albums.”

“I should’ve taken you down there before. There are some great old photos in those boxes. Shirley was quite the historian of our friendship. And then, afterwards, of the life that she and I created together.”

“Pretty amazing, actually,” I admit. “I felt like I was back there.”

A melancholy silence drifts down between us, and I know that Tom and I are thinking through the same old memories. It’s like we’re sharing a mind, sifting through those two summers at the cabin, reliving all of it.

“Was it difficult, not having children?” I ask, peering cautiously at him to see if I’ve caused any offense.

“For a time.”

I wait for more of an explanation, but he lifts his coffee mug and takes another sip. I could only be imagining it, but I think I see a flash of regret drive his gaze lower. It takes less than a second to pass.

“You know . . .” I continue, because I can’t stop talking. My curiosity is too great. “You know, I found the album of the summer Mary was pregnant, right before John was born.”

“Seems like a dream,” Tom replies.

“It does.”

“A dream,” he repeats.

“Shirley was quite the photographer,” I say in a steady voice. “She really knew how to capture all of us. In fact, there were so few photos of her.”

“I always told her she needed to be in more pictures herself.”

“Yeah.” I pause. “But I also looked in the album of photos taken earlier that summer.”

Tom doesn’t say anything. I can’t see his face in the shadows.

“There were some really beautiful photos of Mary. Absolutely stunning.”

“That was Mary,” he says, which seems like a strange thing to say, but I keep going anyway.

“They were so different, those photographs. I don’t think Shirley could have taken them. Completely different style.”

The cicadas and crickets are chirping, and the lake seems to have grown rough, perhaps from the wind that sweeps through the trees. Tiny waves lap against the dock. The trees whisper.

“Did you take those photos, Tom? The ones of Mary?”

He doesn’t reply. In the shadows, he turns his face away from me toward the trees, away from the house. I keep waiting for him to say something, to admit that he had spent those months looking at Mary in such an intimate way.