“Are you sure you want to know? It might be easier—”

“Of course I want to know,” he snapped. “Tell me.”

I chose my next words as carefully as I could, not knowing how to break the news. He’d gone through so much already. Would it be so bad if he didn’t remember? “Not long after this photo was taken, when you were thirteen, your mom...oh, Ash, she...she committed suicide.” I exhaled, wiped my damp hands on my pants as I waited for his reaction, but he continued to stare at me, and so I went on. “You and Brad came to Maine, where he met my mom, and they got married a year after.”

“But now they’re both dead?” he said, and while he sounded cold and detached, I knew it was because he didn’t remember, not because he didn’t care. He’d loved Brad and Mom very much, had been devastated after they’d died. We both had.

“My mom passed a short while later, when I was thirteen. She had a brain tumor.” I touched the side of my head, trying not to remember how Mom had gone from vivacious and bubbly to a gray skin-and-bone skeleton of a human being in a couple of months. I didn’t want Ash to recall it, either. Why would he want to?

He blinked. “We were the same age when our mothers...?”

“Yes,” I whispered. The coincidence had never been lost on us. It had been something else to bring us together, our mutual loss and grief, which only the two of us seemed to understand.

“And my dad?”

I wanted to stop answering his questions. Didn’t want to relive it, or be the one causing Ash to, but he asked me again and so I complied. “He was a foreman, and one day the load fell off a crane at the building site... It was thirteen years ago, when you were almost twenty.” I didn’t want to elaborate. Unless Ash remembered it himself, I wouldn’t mention he’d been the one who’d gone to formally identify Brad at the morgue, that the only way had been the tattoo on his father’s forearm because his skull and torso had been so badly crushed. Ash had broken down that day and it wasn’t something I wanted him to remember. In fact, I’d do anything to make sure he didn’t.

Oblivious to the dark memories swirling in the air between us, Ash said, “Thirteen really is an unlucky number for us, isn’t it?” He shut his eyes and whispered, “Brad, Rosalie, Ophelia. Brad, Rosalie, Ophelia...”

“Do you remember them?” I said, reaching for his hand.

Startled, he pulled away, back out of reach. “Fragments, maybe. Bits and pieces I might be able to connect if I could grab hold of them long enough. What else can you show me? I need to see everything.”