The Photos

There was a box of old photographs in the closet. She had been avoiding it.

She brought it to the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and sat with it and felt the specific weight of what was in it — the life before Drake, the life she had almost forgotten she had had. Herself at twenty-three, in a sundress, laughing at something she could not remember. Her mother at the same age, with the same laugh, the same look in her eyes.

She had been happy once. She knew this in the abstract way you know things you have stopped believing, and sitting with the photographs was a way of touching it, of reminding herself that the person in these images was still somewhere inside her, underneath the stillness she had learned.

There was a photo of Drake too, from early on. The beginning. The version of him that had existed before she had understood what he was — before the mask had come off and stayed off. In the photograph, he was standing on a beach, squinting into the sun, and he looked like someone who could love her.

She put all the photos away. She kept the box. She put the box on the shelf and she went back to the evidence log and she wrote about the photo Ruth had taken and she did not write about the beach.