Three weeks after Rose found the notebooks, Damien went back to the attic.
He went alone, on a Saturday morning, without telling anyone. I knew because Mrs. Aldren knew and Mrs. Aldren told me the way she told me things that were significant, briefly and without editorial.
He was up there for two hours.
He came down with a photograph.
Not the one from Robert’s collection, not the beach photograph with the two boys. Something older. A formal photograph, the kind taken in studios in the mid-twentieth century, stiff and composed and in the particular black and white of that era.
It showed a woman who might have been forty and a man about the same age, standing together in the formal way of photographs from that period that did not invite you to see the people directly.
On the back, in t
