Page 120 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

There’s a badly scanned copy of Delina’s first grade class photo, with Delina circled, then a copy of her Junior High Graduation picture where she’s grimacing around braces while shaking her principal’s hand. None of them are the original, she must’ve pulled them from somewhere, been passed them.

There’s a cutout newspaper article of high school Delina competing in the Model EU, her frustration of it clear even in the black and white photo. There’s a pristine copy of her promphoto, where she went with a bunch of her friends and thought that she looked good in neon orange for a dress.

All little bits of her life, hoarded into this one photo book.

Maison doesn’t say anything, just keeps his hand in between her shoulder blades. He’s had a hard day too, should be much more emotional, but here he is, quietly supportive, as they sit on the floor of the attic.

“There’s no way they knew about this book, did they?” Delina asks, and he shakes his head. “They told me she had no interest in me. My whole life.”

He swallows, then gestures down at the picture from her prom. “I’d say she did.”

Delina squeezes her eyes shut, briefly, against the muted light of the windows, then to him, half desperate. “Do you want to go downstairs? I can look at this later, I don’t need to right now, now when we’re trying to save your mother, it’s insensitive…”

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, tender. “You mean go downstairs and hear the phone ring over and over again that has my mom telling me in coded language to not come save her when that’s exactly what we’re trying to do?” he asks, which is fair, though his voice trembles a bit. “And not be able to do anything until Chloe, an alchemist who specializes in ancient equipment and stone locks, tries to create a phone number tracker on a satellite phone from a laptop that hasn’t worked in probably five years?”

“That’s unfair,” Delina protests, but he shakes his head. “At least it’s inorganic?”

“I guess,” he says, before leaning against her, just a solid pressure against her back, and she takes a brief moment to check his breathing, his lungs working as they should, his heart sending electrical signals to his brain, everything fine. “So I can be up here and possibly uncover more sniper nests and look atembarrassing pictures of your childhood, and that sounds far better.”

She huffs out a wet laugh, and she’s not crying, not exactly, and he offers her one of his heartbreaking smiles, then turns the page for her.

To three mugshots of young men, one of them Maison, five years ago.

“Um,” Delina says, peering at them. Maison’s obviously uncomfortable in them, looking away from the camera, and his hair is short, how he kept it for the first month of knowing each other.

Underneath his picture reads ‘Frederick, half-demon.’

The other two young men are similar in type to him, and underneath theirs reads ‘Lutes, forgery specialist’ and ‘Devin, trapper.’

Delina raises an eyebrow up at Maison, and the expression he wears now mirrors the one in the pic. “Is this my mom’s research on possible boyfriends for me?”

“Looks like it,” he replies, shifting. “Really? They wanted to send Lutes to you? You would’ve hated him, absolutely hated him. He was a snobby asshole.”

Lutes does in fact look like he’d sneer at drinking beer in a rural brewery.

“Devin at least is good looking, but he would’ve bored you inside of a year,” Maison continues, like she actually had any say in this, like she was the one considering them. “But Lutes? No way.”

“Before you found me, we tried to get into the city for cell connection, so I could pull up my Facebook,” Delina tells him, and it's so long ago, after everything else that happened. “So they would know which one you were, because they didn’t know your code name and they wanted to know how to defend this cabin.” She gestures down at the book. “All they’d have to do is look atthis book sometime in the year or so they’ve been here and they would’ve known.”

He stares at her for a long second, then shakes his head. “Oh my god.”

“Literally could’ve avoided the whole tree thing, and I was about to go into the trap when you got there. You would’ve missed us completely, we would have come back to find you in the demon trap and my door wrecked.”

“I would’ve been able to tell you weren’t there,” he protests, but his eyes are crinkling up a bit, like he gets the joke as well. “Good lord, you would’ve passed me in the car on the street.”

“That day would’ve gone differently,” she says, then turns the page.

It’s a picture, obviously printed on flimsy paper from her Facebook page years ago, of the two of them. His arms around her, his smile cheesy, and she’s pressing a kiss to his cheek for the camera. It was right after they graduated and had gone on a trip to Colorado together, and they had both hiked too much and eaten way too much barbecue before crashing at a hotel and doing nothing but sleep for a few days.

And it’s the last page in the book, the rest blank, as if her mother had kept on intending to fill it with more pictures from afar for the rest of Delina’s life.

It’s so few pictures it’s heartbreaking. So many obviously received in secret, hidden in the attic of this cabin, where the sniper’s nest would distract.

Delina closes the book as softly as she can, gentle with the pink frilly cloth covering, and sits there.

“Wow,” Maison says, voice hushed in the still attic air, and he leans against her side, a solid pressure.

“Yeah,” Delina replies, and there are tears, close by, but not quite to her eyes yet. “My dad didn’t have any pictures of her.”

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