. I sat with the photograph until the sky outside the studio window went from black to gray to the pale gold of an actual morning, turning it over again and again, staring at that faded handwriting until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like a code I didn't have the key for.
*Charles, three months before Margaret.*
I didn't know what it meant. I told myself, more than once that night, that it probably meant nothing at all– an old photograph, a stranger's handwriting, a coincidence of names that only felt significant because Eleanor's face had gone so careful and strange when she handed it to me. But some quiet, stubborn part of me kept returning to it anyway, the way your tongue keeps finding a sore tooth even when you know better.
Noah found me there at seven, s
