Maren spread the photographs across the café's back table, weighting down their curling corners with whatever was at hand: a salt shaker, the heavy lid of the sugar tin, a paperweight shaped like a heron that her grandmother had kept near the register for thirty years. The afternoon light came in low through the plate-glass window, turning the dust motes into something almost beautiful, and it caught the riverbank in each picture the same way it caught the river now, a shifting gray-green plane edged with brown reeds.
There were nine photographs in all. She had gathered them slowly over the past two weeks, pulling them from a box of unsorted prints that lived beneath the register and that nobody had looked through since her grandmother's last spring. They were riverbank shots, most of them, taken at different times of year: a man standing on the muddy shore with a fishing rod propped against his hip, the rod bent under some unseen weight. A woman in a red sweater holding a thermos, her mouth caught mid-laugh. Children throwing stones into the current. Maren herself at perhaps six, squinting into the camera with her hand raised against the sun, a small and serious figure on the edge of an enormous gray field of water.
She had laid them out in the order she guessed they had been taken, judging by the clothing and the angle of the light and the way the river itself seemed to vary, higher in some pictures, lower in others, its banks wider or narrower according to season. The sequence covered, she estimated, something like thirteen years.
What she had not expected to find was the sapling.
It appeared first as a thin pale sprout in the third photograph, no taller than her hand, set into the mud about six feet from where the water met the bank. In the fifth photograph, taken perhaps two years later judging by the shorter coat on the woman with the thermos, the sprout had grown into a recognizable sapling, its single trunk the thickness of a finger, a few tentative branches reaching outward. By the seventh photograph it was waist-high, and in the ninth, the most recent one, it had become a young tree, slender still but with a clear crown of leaves, standing at the edge of the water as if it had been waiting there all along.
Maren bent closer. The angle of the bank shifted slightly from picture to picture, the photographer moving a few feet left or right depending on the subject, but the sapling was always in the frame. Always in roughly the same place. As though whoever had taken the pictures had been watching it without knowing it.
She turned the ninth photograph over. On the back, in a careful hand she did not recognize, was a date: August 14. She turned the third over. August 12. She went through the rest. The dates were all in August. They spanned, she counted slowly, fifteen years.
Her coffee had gone cold beside her elbow. She did not remember drinking it.
She called the library at four in the afternoon, when the after-school rush had thinned and Cora usually had a moment to spare. The phone rang four times before the familiar grumble of the librarian's voice came on, half-annoyed, half-pleased.
"Cora, it's Maren. I need you to come over when you close. I've found something."
"Found something." Cora's voice flattened into a question. "In the bookstore, in the café, or in one of your grandmother's boxes?"
"The boxes."
A silence. Cora had known Maren's grandmother. They had played cards together on Wednesdays for what Maren's mother used to call the entirety of recorded history, and after the funeral it had been Cora who had helped Maren sort through the house's contents, murmuring about each item as if she were reading from a liturgy.
"Twenty minutes," Cora said, and hung up.
Maren covered the photographs with a clean cloth napkin and went to wash the coffeepot.
Cora arrived nineteen minutes later, her car door slamming shut with the particular emphasis she reserved for leaving it. She came through the back door of the café as she always did, nodding to the two remaining customers without slowing, and Maren heard her footsteps on the worn linoleum, then the creak of the third-floor stairs, then nothing.
"I am not as young as I pretend to be," Cora said, appearing in the doorway to the back room with one hand braced against the frame. She was a tall woman, still, with gray hair she kept cropped close and a face that had been handsome before time had begun rearranging it. She wore a cardigan the color of pond water and reading glasses pushed up onto her head.
"Sit," Maren said, pulling out a chair.
"I intend to." Cora lowered herself into it with a controlled exhalation, then leaned forward, looking at the cloth-covered stack on the table. "What am I about to see, Maren? You have the expression your grandmother used to get when she had found a quarter behind the radiator."
Maren pulled the cloth away without ceremony.
Cora looked.
She did not speak for a long time. She leaned closer, then pulled back, then leaned in again, her eyes moving from one photograph to the next in the order Maren had arranged. Her hands, which usually moved constantly, fussed with the edge of her cardigan, smoothed her skirt, then went still on the table.
"The sapling," she said finally. Her voice was strange. Quieter than usual. Maren had never heard it go that quiet.
"Yes."
"It is the same sapling."
"Yes."
Cora sat back in her chair. Her gaze drifted to the window, to the river beyond it, and stayed there.
Maren waited. She knew Cora's silences. They were not empty. They were the spaces in which a person decided what shape the next words would take.
"The dates," Cora said at last. "Show me the dates."
Maren turned the photographs over, one by one, and Cora read each date aloud, her voice steadier now, as though the act of speaking them had given her something to stand on. When she reached the final photograph she did not put it down. She held it between her thumb and forefinger, looking at the young tree in the frame as if it might speak back.
"Fifteen years," she said.
"Fifteen."
"And no one has ever mentioned this."
"No."
Cora placed the photograph on the table with a care that bordered on reverence. She removed her reading glasses from the top of her head, considered them, and put them on again. Then she said, very softly, "Who do you think planted it?"
Maren had been thinking about that. The sapling appeared in the third photograph, the earliest August, with no sign of it in either of the two before. She had looked. She had held each of the first two photographs up to the window light and examined the bank, but the resolution was not fine enough, or the sprout was too small, or it had not yet been set into the mud. There was no way to be certain.
"Someone who came back to the same spot every August," she said. "Someone who wanted to see if it lived."
Cora made a sound, low in her throat, that might have been agreement or might have been something else.
"It does not look like a planted tree to me," Cora said. "Not in the way we usually mean. There are no signs of staking. No tube around the trunk. No obvious care." She gestured toward the earliest photograph. "Look at how close it is to the water. Anything planted there would have been washed out within a season or two, unless the bank was reinforced. But the bank is not reinforced. I have walked that stretch a hundred times."
"You have walked that stretch a thousand times," Maren said.
Cora gave her a look that did not quite become a smile. "Perhaps I exaggerate."
"You never exaggerate."
"Then I will say five hundred, and you will not contradict me."
Maren inclined her head.
They sat for a moment, looking at the photographs. The café had gone quiet. The last of the day's customers had gone, the register had been wiped down, the chairs turned upside down on the tables in the way Maren's grandmother had insisted upon, every evening, for as long as the café had been in operation. Outside, the river moved at its usual unhurried pace, the color of old pewter, and a heron lifted from somewhere out of frame and crossed the window in a long, slow arc.
"It is a sycamore," Cora said.
"What?"
"The sapling. It will be a sycamore, if it is not one already. Look at the way the branches spread. The angle. The pale bark, even in the earliest photograph. Sycamores grow fast along moving water. They drop their seeds into the current and the seeds lodge where they lodge, and if the bank is right, they take root. No one plants them. They simply appear."
"So it was not planted."
"I did not say that. I said it does not look planted. There is a difference." Cora removed her glasses again and folded them with the deliberation of a woman folding a letter she intended to keep. "Someone could have brought a seedling down from higher ground. Set it into the mud where the bank curved, where the soil was deeper. Given it a chance."
"Every August."
"Every August. Watching."
Maren looked at the photographs again. In the third, the woman in the red sweater was not in the frame; only a sliver of her sleeve at the edge. In the fifth, the child with the stones was not in the frame; only the blur of a thrown stone above the river. In the ninth, the young tree stood alone at the water's edge, its leaves stirring in a wind that the photograph could not show. The photographer had been elsewhere in every picture. Watching without being seen, perhaps. Or watching without intending to be seen.
"Why bring it to me?" Cora asked.
Maren had not expected the question. She had expected it to come later, after tea, after the photographs had been arranged and rearranged and discussed at length. Instead it had come immediately, in the quiet of the closed café, with the river at their backs.
"Because you know everyone," Maren said. "Because you have been here longer than any of the photographs."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one I have."
Cora studied her. Maren had known Cora long enough to understand that the look was not unkind. It was the look Cora gave a sentence she suspected of being incomplete. She was waiting for the rest.
"Because I think you already know something about this," Maren said.
Cora's hands, which had been still on the table, went stiller. Her face did not change. But something behind it shifted, a small rearrangement of the features, the way a door that has been locked from the inside gives slightly when someone leans against it.
"Who told you that?" Cora said.
"No one. I guessed."
Cora let out a long breath. She did not look at the photographs again. She looked at the window, at the river, and then, finally, at Maren.
"There was a man," she said. "Years ago. He came back every summer. He would park at the bend near the old boat launch and walk down to the water and stand there for a while, and then he would leave. I never saw him plant anything. I never saw him do anything. He simply stood."
"You spoke to him?"
"Once. He asked me the time. I told him. He thanked me. He had an accent I did not recognize. Midwestern, but not from here. Somewhere further west, perhaps. He said his name was Harding. He said he was from a town I had never heard of. He said he used to come to the lake as a child, before the highway went through. He said he liked to see how it had changed."
Cora paused. Her hands had begun to move again, smoothing the cardigan, the tablecloth, the edge of the salt shaker. The motion was almost unconscious.
"He stopped coming," she said. "I do not know when exactly. I noticed one August that he was not there, and then I noticed again the next, and then I stopped noticing. People do that. You expect them to come back and they do not, and eventually you stop expecting it."
"How long ago?"
"Eight years. Nine."
"And these photographs span fifteen."
"Yes."
They looked at each other.
The heron had returned to the bank. Maren could see it through the window, standing motionless on the mud, its long neck folded, its eye trained on some invisible thing beneath the surface. It did not move. It did not need to. It had learned, over its own long life, that the river would bring what it brought, and that patience was its own form of attention.
Cora reached out and touched the corner of the ninth photograph with one finger, gently, as though she were touching the bark of the tree itself.
"We should go down to the bank," she said. "Before the light goes."
Maren began to gather the photographs. Her hands were not entirely steady. She could not have said why.
Maren slid the photographs back into the envelope with the care she might have used for pressed flowers. The paper smelled faintly of cedar and old ink. She placed the envelope in her canvas bag, then paused, then moved it to her inside coat pocket, against her ribs, where she could feel the slight pressure of its edge with every breath.
They left the diner together. Cora held the door, and the bell gave its small brass announcement, and then they were on the sidewalk, and the wind off the lake came up to meet them like a question.
The boardwalk creaked under their feet.
"I haven't taken you down here in years," Cora said.
"I know."
"I used to bring Linnea. When she was small. We would look for the painted turtles on the logs."
"I remember."
"You probably do. You were probably there."
Maren was quiet. She had been there. She had been sixteen and slightly bored and slightly in love with Cora, though she had not known how to name it then and would not have named it now. Linnea had been four. She had worn a yellow sundress and had insisted on naming every turtle they encountered. There had been one she called Mr. President. There had been one she called, with great solemnity, Tuesday.
The reeds began at the waterline and rose in a dense green curtain, chest-high in places, whispering against each other in a language that was not quite language. The smell of the lake thickened, vegetal and mineral, the green scent of things that grew in the water and the colder scent of the water itself. Somewhere a frog gave a single low note, then thought better of it.
Cora stopped where the boardwalk ended and the dirt path began. She did not step down onto the path. She stood with one hand on the railing, and Maren watched her decide something.
"I should tell you," Cora said. "I should tell you, and I do not want to tell you."
"Okay."
"The photographs." Cora still did not look at her. "You asked who took them."
"Yes."
"Harriet Voss."
The name landed strangely. Maren turned it over. She knew the name. Everyone in town knew the name. Harriet Voss had taught fourth grade at the elementary school for forty-one years. She had taught Linnea. She had taught Maren, briefly, in a long-ago spring when the regular teacher had been on maternity leave. Harriet Voss had thin lips and sharper eyes and a way of standing very still in the middle of a classroom that made eleven-year-olds feel suddenly interested in being alive.
"Harriet," Maren said.
"Yes."
"I didn't know she took photographs."
"Most people do not know." Cora's mouth did something complicated. "Harriet was, in her own way, a photographer. Long ago. Before the marriage, before she came back here to teach. She studied in Chicago for a year. She had an eye. She gave it up. There were reasons. She does not speak of them."
The reeds bent and straightened.
"How did you get these?" Maren asked.
Cora was quiet for a long time. The lake slapped the pilings beneath them in a slow, indifferent rhythm.
"They were given to me," she said finally. "By Harriet. Years ago. They came in a box with a number of other things, books and papers, that she was sending to the historical society, except she had lost patience with the historical society, or perhaps with the town in general, and she asked if I would take them instead. I said I would. I did not know what was in the box. She did not tell me. When I went through it, years later, when I was finally clearing out the back room of the library, I found the envelope at the bottom, under a stack of ledgers from the old canning company."
"Why didn't you ask her?"
"I did ask her. Once. She looked at me for a very long time, and then she said, 'I have no recollection of any such envelope, Cora. You must be mistaken.' And she walked away. I did not press it. You do not press Harriet Voss. Not about certain things."
The light on the water had begun to change. The sun had moved behind a thin shelf of cloud, and the lake had turned the color of pewter, with veins of dull gold running through it where the cloud thinned.
"The negatives," Maren said. "You said they were lost in a flood."
"They were thought to be lost in a flood." Cora corrected her with care. "In the flood of ninety-six. The one that took out the basement of the elementary school, and half of Main Street, and the old municipal building where the records were kept. There was a storeroom in the basement of the school. Harriet kept many things in that storeroom. She kept teaching materials, and boxes of her own, and a filing cabinet with drawers she said were none of the principal's business. After the flood, the school basement was unusable for a season. By the time they got back in, the boxes had been moved, or thrown out, or had simply gone where boxes go when no one is responsible for them."
"And the negatives were in that storeroom."
"That was the assumption. That was what Harriet said, when she was asked. That was what the principal told the superintendent. That was what the historical society put in its records. The negatives of the photography project were presumed destroyed in the flood of nineteen ninety-six. Case closed. The matter was not investigated further, because there was no one to investigate it, and no budget, and because, after a certain point, people stopped asking about photographs of a tree."
Maren listened to her own breathing.
"But the prints were not destroyed," Maren said.
"No."
"And the negatives may not have been destroyed either."
"No." Cora turned to her at last. Her face was still, but her eyes were not. "That is what I have been thinking about, Maren. For some time. That is what I have not been saying."
The frog tried again, further off now, in a different key.
"Harriet lied," Maren said.
"She did not lie. Harriet Voss does not lie. Harriet Voss simply does not always volunteer the whole of what she knows." Cora paused. "There is a difference. A distinction. Harriet would tell you there is a difference."
"And the negatives?"
"I do not know. Truly." Cora's voice had dropped, not to a whisper, but to the register she used when she was being precise. "I do not know where the negatives are. I know that prints exist, because I have held them. I know that prints have been made from those negatives at some point, because you cannot make a print without a negative. And I know that, in nineteen ninety-six, the official record says that all materials related to the project were lost."
She folded her arms.
"There is a third possibility," she said. "That the negatives were never in the storeroom at all. That they were somewhere else the entire time. That Harriet knew where they were, and that she chose to let everyone believe they were gone."
"Why would she do that?"
Cora was quiet.
"I do not know," she said again. "I have been turning that question over for some time, and I do not know. I have known Harriet Voss for forty years. I have known her to be many things. I have known her to be kind, and sharp, and difficult, and loyal in ways she would never admit to. I have known her to be a woman who keeps things. Who files things. Who does not throw anything away unless she has a reason. She would not have let those negatives be lost by accident. If they are gone, it is because she let them go."
The wind came up off the lake and stirred the reeds. Somewhere behind them, the diner door opened and closed, and there was the faint clatter of a plate, and then nothing.
"She is not well," Cora said. "You know that."
"I know."
"She is eighty-one. She forgets things now that she would not have forgotten before. Names. Appointments. The day of the week. She still knows the children, mostly. She still knows the regulars at the diner. But the edges are going. Della has been worried. I have been worried. We have not spoken of it to each other, because we do not know how."
Maren thought of Harriet Voss in her pressed blouses, with her hair pinned tight, with her sharp eyes that had always seemed to see through the back of your head and out the other side. She thought of Harriet Voss at the diner, ordering her soup, holding her spoon in a particular way. She thought of Harriet Voss saying, "You must be mistaken, Cora," in a voice that permitted no further questions.
"If we ask her," Maren said carefully, "if we ask her now, before she, before the edges go further. She may not be able to answer us later."
"Yes."
"And you have not asked her."
"No." Cora looked down at her own hands. They were not smooth hands. They were librarian's hands, with paper cuts healed and re-cut, with a small scar across one knuckle from a fall on the ice ten winters ago. "I have not asked her, because I am afraid of the answer. And I am afraid of asking in the wrong way, and losing her. She is one of the last people in this town who remembers what this town was. I do not want to be the one who broke her."
The heron lifted off the bank with a slow, deliberate motion, its legs trailing, its neck extended. It flew low across the water, its shadow sliding beneath it on the pewter surface, and then it disappeared into the reeds on the far side, and the reeds closed behind it like a curtain.
"We should not ask her alone," Maren said.
"No."
"We should not bring Della, because Della will be too gentle, and Della will let her off."
"Yes."
"We should bring someone else. Someone Harriet will not be able to dismiss."
Cora looked at her.
"Who," she said, and it was not quite a question.
Maren thought of the photographs in her pocket. She thought of the tree. She thought of the name on the back of the ninth print, in pencil, half-erased. She thought of a town that had decided, a long time ago, that certain things were gone, and a woman who had not contradicted that decision.
"We should ask her tomorrow," Maren said. "At the diner. Over her soup. Before she forgets that we came."
Cora was quiet for a long moment. The wind moved through the reeds. The lake breathed.
"Tomorrow," she said.
They stood there together as the light began to fail, and did not speak, and did not need to.
Maren turned the cardboard sign in the front window of the bookstore-cafe to CLOSED at four-thirty, two hours earlier than the posted hours. The bell above the door gave its familiar small complaint as she locked it behind her, the sound so ordinary it almost felt like a lie. The afternoon pressed warm against the plate glass, and the street was quiet in the way Millhaven got quiet in late summer, not empty but held, as if the town were listening for something.
She had not planned to go to the mill. She had planned to sit at the counter with the photographs spread in front of her, the way she had been doing for three nights running, and to look at them until they gave up their pattern. But that morning a flyer had appeared tucked under the cafe door, the kind of flyer that gets photocopied at the library and left in stacks at the hardware store, the ink slightly smudged at the fold. NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION MEETING, it said. MILL BUILDING, SECOND FLOOR. 5:00 PM. REFRESHMENTS. The handwriting at the bottom, in green pen, was Cora's.
Maren walked the three blocks to the old flour mill with her hands in her pockets and the photographs in the bag on her shoulder, the leather strap cutting a line into her collarbone. The mill sat at the bend in the road where the street used to turn toward the lake before the highway rerouted everything in 1987. Its brick face was dark with age, the windows on the upper floors boarded over with plywood that had faded to the color of driftwood. A hand-lettered sign above the side entrance read KEEP MILLHAVEN WET in paint that was peeling at the edges.
Inside, the stairs smelled of dust and old machine oil, and the second floor opened into a room that had once been the sorting floor, where grain was sifted and bagged and sent down a chute to the wagons waiting below. The chute was still there, a dark square in the floor at the far end, now covered with a piece of plywood and a potted fern that looked like it was on its last week. Mismatched folding chairs had been set up in rows, and a long table at the back held coffee in a percolator that had seen better decades, a plate of cookies from the bakery, and a stack of paper cups.
Cora was standing near the percolator, talking to a man in a green fishing vest who was explaining something about water levels with the enthusiasm of the recently retired. She caught Maren's eye and lifted two fingers, a small wave, and went back to the conversation without breaking her sentence. Maren took a cup of coffee and a cookie she did not particularly want, and found a chair near the window, where the light came in low and warm and turned the dust motes into something almost purposeful.
She did not know, when she sat down, that she was about to meet Della Kryzewski.
The meeting began at five-fifteen, which Maren understood was the actual start time, and not a delay. Harriet Voss was not in attendance, which Maren noted with something between relief and disappointment. A man named Les gave a report about the bridge. A woman named Pat gave a report about the sewer. A teenage boy who Maren guessed was the grandson of someone important took minutes on a yellow legal pad with the bored focus of someone who had been taught that showing up was the job.
Then a voice from the back of the room said, "If we're done talking about infrastructure, I'd like to say something about the clinic."
Maren turned.
The woman who had spoken was sitting two rows behind her, slightly to the left, in a chair that had been pulled away from the row and angled toward the window. She was maybe sixty, maybe older, with hair the color of iron that had been cut short and practical, and a face that looked like it had spent a lot of years outdoors in wind. She wore a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her hands, which rested on her knees, were the hands of someone who had done work. There was a pen tucked behind one ear, and a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto her head like a headband.
"Della," someone near the percolator said, in the tone of someone who had hoped this would not come up.
Della Kryzewski looked at that person for a long moment, and then she looked back at the room.
"The clinic has been running on the same generator since 2014," she said. "It is fifteen years past the manufacturer's recommended lifespan. I have been told, twice, by the county, that a replacement is on the list. I have been told this every year since I took over from Dr. Pell. I do not need to tell anyone in this room what happens to a two-person clinic in a town like this when the power goes out and the freezer full of vaccines does not come back on. So I am asking, formally, in front of witnesses, whether the neighborhood association would consider adding the clinic to its list of priorities, or whether I should start driving patients to Brenner."
The room was quiet.
A man in a fishing vest cleared his throat. "Della, we appreciate the work you do."
"I did not ask you to appreciate my work, Les. I asked you about the generator."
Maren watched Della's face as she spoke. There was no anger in it, or at least not the kind of anger that flares. There was something flatter, something that had been worn down by years of asking and not getting, and that had hardened in the wearing. She spoke the way Maren imagined a person spoke who had grown up without anyone to speak for her and had learned, early, that the alternative to speaking for herself was silence, and that silence, in this town, in this room, had a specific cost.
The meeting moved on. Della's request was added to a list that Maren suspected was already long. Coffee was refilled. Someone brought out a second plate of cookies, these from the IGA, the cellophane still on. Maren found herself standing near the back table, turning a paper cup in her hands, when Della came up beside her and poured herself a cup from the percolator without looking at it.
"You're the bookstore girl," Della said. It was not a question.
"Maren Ellis."
"I know who you are. I've been in your shop twice. The coffee is better than it has any right to be."
"Thank you."
"I read the first chapter of a book in your window last week. The one with the blue cover. I didn't buy it because I was between patients and didn't have time, and I have been thinking about it since. That is not a complaint. It is an observation."
Maren felt something shift in her chest, the way a lock shifts when the right key is put into it.
"I can put it aside for you," she said.
"You don't need to. I will come back for it. I am methodical about these things."
They stood in a silence that was not uncomfortable. Della drank her coffee. Maren turned her cup.
"The thing you said," Maren said, carefully. "About the generator. How long have you been asking?"
"Eleven years."
"And the answer has always been the same."
"The answer has always been some version of the same. The list, Della. The budget, Della. The timing, Della. You understand."
"I understand."
"I do not say this to be dramatic. I say it because I have learned that if you do not say it plainly in a room with folding chairs, nobody hears you. The room with folding chairs is the only room where anyone hears anything at all."
Maren looked at Della Kryzewski and felt, for the first time since she had come back to Millhaven, that she was in the presence of someone who had no patience for the particular kind of politeness that this town used as a way of not saying what it meant.
"I have a question," Maren said.
"You have several. I can tell. You have the look."
"Would you walk with me? I have something to show you, and I would rather not show it here."
Della looked at her for a long moment. Then she set her cup down on the table, precisely in the center of a paper napkin.
"I have twenty minutes," she said. "I have a patient at six-thirty."
They went out through the side door, into the warm evening. The light had gone gold and then amber, and the shadow of the mill stretched across the cracked pavement of the small parking lot. Maren led Della around to the back of the building, where the old loading dock still jutted out over the water, its planks soft with age, the river below slow and brown and smelling of silt.
"I am going to show you something," Maren said, "and I need you to tell me what you see."
She took the photographs out of her bag. She handed them to Della, one by one, in order, the way she had been arranging them on the cafe counter for three nights. Della took them without a word, and held them up to the last of the light, and studied each one for a long time, in the order she had been given, and did not skip ahead.
The river breathed against the pilings. A fish jumped somewhere out in the dark water. The breeze moved through the weeds at the edge of the lot, the dry sound of it like a page turning.
"These are from your grandmother's collection," Della said, after a long time.
"Yes."
"And you want to know who the girl is."
"Yes."
Della turned the ninth print over in her hand. She looked at the pencil writing on the back, the half-erased name. She did not say it out loud.
"I know who the girl is," Della said. "I have known since the second picture. I am deciding whether to tell you."
Maren waited.
"It is not that I don't trust you," Della said. "I don't know you well enough to have an opinion about whether I trust you. It is that this is not my story to tell, and I have spent my whole life being careful about whose stories I take into my mouth."
"I understand."
"Do you."
"I think so."
Della looked at her, and then she looked back at the photograph. The light was almost gone. The sky over the river was the color of a bruise that was healing.
"Her name was Sophie Kryzewski," Della said. "She was my mother's sister. She was nineteen in that photograph. She died in the fire at the cannery in the fall of 1974. She was nineteen years old. There is no grave. There is no record. There is a tree that your grandmother planted, and these pictures, and me."
The wind came up off the water and moved through the weeds, and the weeds bent and rose, and the last of the light went out of the sky, and the river became a dark shape against a darker shore.
"I will tell you the rest," Della said, "but not here. And not tonight. Tomorrow. At the diner. Before Harriet."
"Yes," Maren said. "Before Harriet."