Aria's POV
The photograph was cold in my hands even though the room was warm.
I stared at the man's silver eyes, catching the light at an angle that made them almost luminous even in an old photograph, even through twenty years of fading and careful storage. The same angle. The same quality of light that I kept catching in mirrors at wrong moments and telling myself was stress or bad lighting or anything except what it obviously was.
My mother was laughing in the photograph. Genuinely laughing with her head tilted back, one hand raised like she was mid-sentence about something that had gotten away from her. She looked young. Younger than I had ever seen her, even in the earliest memories I had of her before the illness took the softness out of everything. She looked like someone
