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."
Nathan stood up slowly, the way you stand up near a frightened animal, and held the photograph out — picture side up, so that she had to see her sister laughing up at her from seven summers ago.
Her hand stopped in the air. For one second the anger fell off her, and Nathan saw what was underneath it: grief, fresh enough to still be a wound, and the terror of a young woman who has been holding a child and a secret together with both hands for four months and has just felt one of them slip.
"You're Emma," he said.
"Emma Collins." Her eyes came up to his face then, really up to it, for the first time, and he saw her do what Leo had done: the chin, the hairline, the eyes. "And you are — "
"Nathan Reed. I'm a captain here. Leo came and found me. He asked me — "
"I know what he asked you." The words came out fast and low, while she pulled Leo in against her side and held on. "He has been asking everybody. The man on the television — " She stopped. Took a breath. "I'm sorry he's troubled you with this. He lost his mother in January. He doesn't understand what he's saying."
"Aunt Emma, it is him," Leo said into her cardigan, muffled and mutinous. "You said Dad was gone. But he's here. He's right here. You said I could ask him."
"I said no such — Leo, sweetheart, I said we would talk about the photograph at home."
"You said when I was bigger!"
People were still watching. Nathan could feel the story assembling itself in the heads around them — fire captain, lost boy, a photograph — and felt a sudden, fierce protectiveness that startled him: not for himself. For the boy, and for this shaking woman, and for a dead woman in a yellow dress who had written those words as a shield.
A man at the edge of the crowd had his phone up, filming, with the unhurried shamelessness of a person who has mistaken other people's worst moments for weather. Nathan saw him over Emma's shoulder and something in him, trained and ugly, did a swift piece of arithmetic about sightlines. He shifted half a step, no more, and put his own body where the lens wanted Leo to be; six feet of fire captain in dress uniform, smiling the public smile, a wall with manners. The man lowered the phone, abashed, and found somewhere else to be. Derek, arriving at the edge of his vision, caught the whole transaction and said nothing, only widened his own stance beside the raffle table, so that between the two of them the little family in the middle of the fair had, for a moment, something like a fence around it. Nathan had no idea why he had done it. He would spend some time, later, not examining the fact that it had not felt like a decision at all.
"Miss Collins," he said. "Emma. There's a quiet room inside the station. Nobody will bother us there. I think — " He looked down at Leo, who looked back, daring him to lie. "I think Leo is owed a proper conversation. Not in the street. Will you come inside? Just to talk."
She looked at the station doors, at the crowd, at the photograph. She looked at Nathan's face once more, long and searching, and something in her own face changed — not trust, not yet, but the first unwilling admission that the resemblance was beyond coincidence, beyond anything she had prepared herself for that morning.
"Five minutes," she said at last. "And you will give him a proper answer, Captain Reed, whatever it is. He has had enough of people being kind instead of true."
"Yes," Nathan said. "I will."
He did not yet know what the proper answer was. He only knew the name written in faded blue ink, and that his hands, which had not shaken on a roof in a storm in fifteen years of fires, were shaking now.