"That's you," Leo said, and for the first time his voice broke. "That's you and that's my mum. She kept it in her box. So why — " He drew a breath that shook. "Why didn't you come?"
Nathan Reed, who had carried strangers out of burning buildings, stood in the middle of his own station fair holding a photograph of himself that was not himself, and could not find one single word.
Chapter 2: The Face in the Photograph
"Captain?"
Derek's voice came from a long way off. Nathan was dimly aware that a small crowd had paused around them, all of them watching a seven-year-old boy wait, with terrible patience, for an answer.
Nathan made himself breathe. He made himself look at the photograph properly, the way he had been trained to look at a scene: not at the thing that frightened him, but at everything around it.
The print was old-fashioned, its white border yellowed. The woman first: dark hair, a wide, unguarded smile, one hand resting low on the curve of her belly as if she were holding something up for the camera to admire too. She was beautiful in the way of someone mid-laugh, mid-sentence, mid-life.
Then the man again, and Nathan's stomach turned over a second time. The build was his, the height was his, even the tilt of the head he had cursed in photographs of himself for thirty-eight years.
He knew that beach the way you know a room you grew up in. The Reeds had rented a grey shingled house above Cannon Beach for two weeks of every August of his childhood, and he and Daniel had been turned loose on that sand like colts, sunburned, feral, fluent in tides. He could still feel the particular cold of that water going over his knees. He could see his mother on a striped blanket with a book she never finished, calling them in for sandwiches with sand in them. The man in the photograph was standing perhaps fifty yards from the spot where Daniel, aged eleven, had buried Nathan up to the neck and charged tourists a quarter to look at the head. Nathan had not been back since the funeral, could not have said why, except that some places stopped being places and became evidence. And here was his brother, grown, laughing, on that same sand, with his arm around a pregnant girl, in a summer that Nathan had spent four thousand miles away fighting fire in the Alaskan interior, knowing nothing.
"Leo," he said carefully. "Where did you get this?"
"Mum's box." Leo's eyes never left his face. "Under her bed. Aunt Emma doesn't know I took it. It was in an envelope with writing."
"Writing?"
"On the back."
Nathan did not want to turn the photograph over. He understood, in the wordless way a man understands a floor is about to give way, that whatever was written on the back had been waiting years to be read by him. He turned it over anyway.
The handwriting was a woman's, quick and slanting, in faded blue ink.
Daniel and Sarah — August. Leo, you were already loved.
August. Seven years ago, by the age of the boy standing in front of him. A photograph taken the August before Leo was born, and a name in blue ink that Nathan had not heard spoken aloud in ordinary conversation for —
"Daniel," he said, out loud, without meaning to.
Leo flinched as if the name had been thrown at him. "That's not — " He shook his head, hard. "Mum wrote it wrong sometimes. She was poorly. That is you. You were there. That is our boat."
"It isn't our boat, Leo."
"You are in the picture!"
"I know it looks like — "
"IT IS YOU!"
The shout cracked the fair's good humour like a plate dropped on concrete. Derek stepped in then, smooth as oil, moving people gently away with jokes and big hands, building Nathan a small island of quiet, and Nathan could have wept with gratitude and could not, because Leo was looking at him the way people look at a door closing.
"Leo? LEO!"
A woman's voice, high with panic, cut across the crowd, and then she was there — a tote bag banging against her hip, her cardigan half off one shoulder, her face white to the lips. Twenty-nine, maybe, red-brown hair dragged back in a knot that was coming undone. She seized Leo by both shoulders and looked him over like a woman counting limbs after an accident.
"Do not wander away from me like that, do you understand me? I have been everywhere, I thought — " She broke off, breathless, and only then registered the tall man in uniform in front of her nephew, and what was in his hand.
She looked at the photograph.
Nathan watched horror arrive on her face in stages, the way you watch weather come across water. First incomprehension. Then recognition — of the picture, of him, of the exact disaster she had clearly lain awake imagining. Then a fury so pure it steadied her voice completely.
"Give me that," she said.
"Emma, I — " Leo began.
"Not you. Him." She held out her hand, and it shook, and she pressed it flat against her thigh for a second before holding it out again. "That does not belong to you. Give it back to me, please."