My pulse had started racing. Slowly, Miles pulled out his phone, then opened a photo, and turned the screen toward me.
I stopped breathing.
Because I recognized it instantly. The same photograph, the same moment, the same smile, the same wind-blown hair. Except one thing was different.
Jack was standing beside me with his arm around my shoulders, both of us laughing at something beyond the edge of the frame.
For a moment, the room disappeared. I could only stare.
Twenty years earlier, I’d spent an entire weekend cutting Jack out of every photograph I owned. I remembered cutting this one. I remembered the scissors. The trembling hands. The anger. The tears. I remembered reducing an entire relationship into a space.
And now, for the first time in two decades, I was looking at the original.
Intact. Preserved. Saved.
Miles was watching me carefully.
Maddy’s voice sounded far away.
“Mom?”
I swallowed. “When was this taken?”
Miles shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he hesitated. “Actually…”
“What?”
He looked down at the phone. “My dad kept a separate album.”
The words sent a chill through me.
“A separate album?”
Miles nodded. “Just photographs with you.”
Nobody spoke, because suddenly none of this made sense. Jack had moved on. Married. Had children. Built a life. So had I. And yet somehow he’d kept an album containing photographs I thought no longer existed.
Not one photograph. An album.
I stared at the image again.
The young man smiling beside me looked so familiar. And suddenly one question rose above all the others. If Jack had kept all of this, what had he been carrying for 20 years that I didn’t know about?
For the next two days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the photograph. Not the picture itself. The album. An entire album.
