Hours upon hours of work sat upon the table. Crumpled pages showed failed attempts at tracing other family trees, names written and crossed out before being written again. At the library, he’d searched through the microfilm for any listing of the Woodsman name, saving whatever he could find. Photocopied daguerreotypes of the extended family members lay scattered about. Some had names marked at the bottom, but many were nameless figures, ghost images, their blank expressions staring back.

Mira saw a few pages of Jesse’s own family tree, an attempt at trying to connect his own story with the Woodsmans. If Jesse hadn’t meant for these pages to be there, he didn’t let on. There were a lot of empty spaces for where the names of his family members should go, and it made her wonder how much of this was him trying to give his past some sort of meaning, making it bearable, as if hidden in all this was an answer for everything that had happened to him. Like her, his life was haunted by the past, had been marked by it, and maybe this was his attempt at finding a sense of agency over his story.

Mira placed the clipping back on the table with the rest of the information he’d gathered, and in doing so, caught a glimpse of another portrait. She’d almost passed over the photograph, but tucked underneath the others was the one he’d taken of her when they were kids. He’d shot two that day—one of her with Celine, but also another, surprising her with the flash as she heard him call her name—but this was the one he kept. When she looked at herself in this photograph, she felt like the girl looking back at her was a stranger. She saw a girl young and vulnerable, with a curious, open stare. She saw the threadbare T-shirt with the holes on the hem she wore when her mother wasn’t around to see. She saw the frenzied, wild mess of her hair from their run through the woods. The recognition of how she’d once allowed herself to be overtook her. Mira’s fingers traced over the photograph, as if somehow by touching she could reach out to the girl she’d been.

XVIII.

CELINE MUST HAVE known about this. No way could this be a coincidence,” Mira told Jesse after she was finished going through all of his research.

Jesse swallowed a couple of times and leaned back on the couch. He wouldn’t look at her face.