Page 25 of A Killing Cold

As if this was the image I was grasping for, when I sketched out what I wanted and handed it to the artist. As if glimpsed in a half-obscured reflection, through memory long submerged.

I sink down onto the stool. My mouth is dry.

Why is this here?

Absurd. It belongs here. I’m the thing out of place.

Trapped between the back of the vanity and the wall is a triangle of white no bigger than a clipped fingernail. It has the gloss of photograph paper, and now I spy the telltale squared-off smudges on the vanity mirror, where other photographs might have been taped. Whoever cleared this place out must have missed one.

My eyes fix on it. My hands are shaking, a tremor that starts in my smallest finger and radiates until I have to clench both hands tight against my body to still them.

I should go. Turn and walk out of this place and put all of it, these strange coincidences, out of my mind. They mean nothing.

And yet instead of turning around, I reach out. I pinch the corner of that little white scrap, draw it out. It’s a photograph; apart from a crease where it was trapped against the wall, it’s intact.

The photograph shows a man you could almost mistake for Connor. The same mouth, the same slightly gawky ears. He wears a heavy coat, unzipped, a gray sweater underneath. He holds the mittened hand of a very young child. She’s cocooned in a bright pink winter coat. Hercheeks are bright red. Despite the cold, she isn’t wearing a hat, her brown hair in a loose tumble over her shoulders. In her other arm, she clutches a stuffed bear. It looks brand-new, with a bright red ribbon around its throat. The man is smiling. She isn’t.

I know that girl. Of course I do. I don’t have much of anything from when I was younger, but I stared at the photos of myself displayed on the mantel often enough. Me at the dinner table; next to a Christmas tree; dressed in my Sunday best with my hair in French braids, eyes still red from crying at how hard Beth pulled to get them flat and even.

I feel as if I am not in my body at all. It has dissolved around me, leaving me untethered. I don’t know how long I sit there, staring at the photograph, mind reeling.

The man is obviously Connor’s father—Liam Dalton.

And the girl in the photograph is me.

10

I pour myself a glass of wine back at White Pine to steady my nerves. The photo sits out on the counter.

It makes no sense—so little sense that the fact of its existence seems hard to hold on to. Like if I look away, it will vanish.

I can’t have been here. I can’t have been holding Liam Dalton’s hand, because I had never heard of him before I met Connor, had never heard of this place, and it’s too strange, too wild a coincidence. If I had been here, I would remember.

Except that something terrible happened to me, and there is a reason no one stays in Dragonfly anymore.

The wine has a meaty, metallic taste. I set it down with a grimace, pick up the photograph again. Try to convince myself that it isn’t me. Or to come up with an explanation for how it could be that I happened to find my way back to this place, if it is.

The shadow of the photographer spills across the snow. The wind lifts long hair from their shoulders—a woman? It’s impossible to tell anything more.

Is she wearing a red scarf?

I almost don’t hear the footsteps on the porch. As the door opens, I grab for the book I abandoned on the table this morning and slide the photograph among the pages as the door swings inward. Connor enters, knocking snow from his boots, his cheeks blushing bright from the cold.

“You’re back,” I say, sounding guilty. Connor doesn’t seem to notice.

“I couldn’t leave you all on your own for too long,” he says. “Who knows what kind of trouble you could get into.” There’s somethingstrange in his voice—a flatness, almost like anger, that makes the words sound more accusative than joking.

Tell him.

If that photographisme, then it was taken when Connor was a child. If I was—if thegirlwas about four, he would have been seven. Old enough to remember another child visiting for the winter retreat, surely.

He’ll be able to tell me who she was and prove I’m imagining things.

“I’m going to take a quick shower,” he says. He tosses his hat and gloves onto the bench just inside the door and doesn’t wait for an answer. I sit with my lips parted, words unformed. I could say something. Stop him. But I tell myself I’m only being considerate. I am waiting, that’s all, for a few minutes, a more convenient time.

I haven’t told him the details of my past. He knows I was adopted. He knows I don’t consider the Scotts my family. We’ve never dug into the reasons for it, but he has to have guessed some of it. The story is common enough. Control. “Discipline.” Adherence to a code that prized obedience over love.

He doesn’t know that I have four years unaccounted for.

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