I couldn't stop looking at it.
I sat with the photograph long after I should have put it away, tracing the edges of that careful, precise hole with my fingertip, like touching it might somehow reveal what had been erased. The little girl's smile stayed the same no matter how long I stared. It was the boy who kept changing — becoming, in my mind, a dozen different faces, none of which I could actually picture, all of which felt somehow wrong.
I studied everything the picture still had to offer. The garden, unfamiliar, roses climbing some kind of trellis behind us. My own scuffed shoes. And his coat — dark, heavy, tailored in a way that seemed strange for a child, with something stitched onto the collar I had to hold the photo up to the lamp to make out properly.
A crest. Small, embroider
