It was not a professional portrait. It was the kind of photograph that only makes it onto a shelf because the person in it means something. Slightly out of focus, the colors slightly warm, in the way of pictures taken before everyone had a camera in their pocket all the time. It showed a young woman, probably in her late 20s, standing in front of a small storefront.
She was smiling. Not the managed, professional smile of the woman currently asleep on the couch across the room, but a full, unguarded, somewhat dazzled smile. The smile of someone who has just received news so good they haven’t fully processed it yet. Beside her in the photograph was a man, slightly older, with an arm around her shoulders and an expression of straightforward pride.
Ethan stared at the photograph for a long time. His jacket was still half on. He was not moving. The expression on his face was the expression of a man who has just recognized something he had convinced himself he would never see again, something he had buried so thoroughly under the accumulated weight of subsequent years he had almost succeeded in forgetting it was real. Almost.
He set his jacket down on the armchair beside him. Very slowly, he sat down. And looked at the photograph and tried to figure out what you were supposed to do with a discovery like this. The morning came in through the tall windows the way morning comes into houses with no curtains drawn all at once, without warning, with a completeness that makes the previous darkness feel like a different country.
Victoria’s eyes opened. For a moment, she had the pure, blank disorientation of someone who is awake before their context has arrived. Then it arrived. The headache, the residue of the previous evening assembling itself in chronological order. The gala. The bar.
The parking lot. A car. Her house. She sat up. She was still in her dress. She was on her own couch.
She was alone. On the coffee table, a glass of water and two ibuprofen. On the notepad, a short note in handwriting she didn’t recognize. She read it twice. Nothing happened. You’re safe.