Pictures Of Us. Amy Garvey

he finally spoke, his voice faltered over the words, and he didn’t meet my gaze.

      “That was Sophia Keating,” he said, and my stomach clenched. I didn’t know that name. That couldn’t be good.

      I could hear the first of the crickets striking up out in the grass, and the faint thump of the bass from Emma’s stereo was just audible from her open window. The familiar sounds were something to focus on, because the rest of the world seemed to rush past in a dizzying blur when Michael continued, his face in profile against the last of the sun, a vague shadow.

      “I…well, she’s the mother of my son,” he said, and drew in a lungful of evening air. His jaw was set in a hard line, as if he had to force the words out. “I…I have a twenty-year-old son named Drew, according to her. And he wants to meet me.”

      Son. The word didn’t make any sense at first. We had a daughter, Emma. Where had a son come from? And who in sweet hell was Sophia Keating?

      And then I did the math, feebly, my mind tripping back over the years, and figured it out.

      “Oh.” It was hardly a reply. It was barely a word. But I couldn’t get anything else past my lips. Not with my heart clattering like a broken jackhammer in my chest.

      “Tess?” Michael crouched beside me then, taking my hand. His dark eyes had gone even darker now, had always seen right through me. Michael knew me too well.

      “I’m cold.” It was possibly the most inane thing I could have said. Plus it was still warm out. But Michael didn’t question me, and we went inside together. His hand in mine felt as it always had, warm and strong and slightly rough, the way men’s hands usually seemed to, and I was grateful to cling to it.

      We carried a bottle of red wine and two glasses up to the bedroom, heedless of the workday to come. I needed something to smooth the raw edges of my nerves, and to soften the tension strung between us, taut enough to snap.

      “Talk to me, Tess,” Michael said, setting down his empty wineglass and fixing me with a troubled, deep brown stare.

      I wasn’t sure I could. Despite the wine, which had numbed my tongue and my emotions a little too well, I was still stunned. Our bedroom was familiar in the evening shadows, the bed the same cozy, rumpled nest we’d slept in for nearly twenty years, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life, so long sturdily set on its foundation, had suddenly been shoved to the edge of a cliff. That, possibly, it had been built there all along, held up with masking tape and toothpicks and a few ancient rubber bands. I knew exactly when this child—young man, now—would have been conceived, and what was more, I understood my part in it. Neither fact made the news any easier to bear.

      Once, Michael had said to five-year-old Emma, who was pawing through our wedding photos at the time, sprawled on the wide blue field of our bed, her hair still damp from her after-dinner bath, “I knew I was going to marry Mommy the day I met her.”

      I hadn’t corrected him, since it was probably true, even though the roots of our relationship were much more tangled than that. Even at seventeen, Michael had been confident about what he wanted, and since then what he’d wanted most was me. It was romantic, certainly, and as comfortable—and comforting—as a favorite sweater, something I could wrap around myself, grateful for its warmth, its texture, its very familiarity.

      But sometimes it was overwhelming. When Michael turned the high-powered beam of that love on me, its light, its heat, could be blinding. Then again, I’d certainly never doubted it.

      And I didn’t really doubt it now. At least, I didn’t want to. I took Michael’s hand, holding it hard even though I couldn’t face him. My gaze was drawn to the line of framed photographs on my dresser, Michael and me, Michael and Emma, Emma alone. Moments in time, most of them caught with my own camera, and in all of them we were smiling. I recalled the story behind each picture, too—the piece of birthday cake Michael and Emma had shared before I snapped them sitting at the kitchen table, their lips still sticky with frosting; the bright fall day Michael and I had signed the papers to close on this house, both of us terrified and elated and exhausted all at once.

      Each picture offered its own truth, a testament to love and laughter and family. Even if there were dozens of other moments that hadn’t been captured, it didn’t make those happy faces a lie. I pulled Michael’s arm around me as I settled back into the pillows, grateful for the dim light, and for the free pass I believed twenty-five years of loving Michael bought me.

      “Tomorrow, okay?” I whispered, turning my head just far enough to speak over my shoulder. “We can talk tomorrow.”

      Because no matter what had happened twenty years ago, I needed to believe that there would be always be a tomorrow for us.

      AS I LAY IN BED THAT NIGHT, drifting uneasily toward sleep, I let my memory lead me back in time, to twenty-five years earlier, when Michael had appeared in my life out of nowhere and changed it forever.

      I might have created him, given the right tools. His resemblance to the man I’d dreamed of, danced with, spoken to in the fantasies that occupied me while I did my barre work or ran in the mornings before school was so unnerving that, from the beginning, I found myself obsessed with touching him. A dream made flesh, or so it seemed, I wanted the reassuring proof of bone beneath skin, the rhythmic pulse of a heart that beat.

      I don’t have any photos of the day we met, of course. We were just seventeen when we did. The school year had ended the day before, and Lucy, Cath and I had piled into Lucy’s ancient Beetle to drive to the Jersey shore. Sandy Hook was only forty-five minutes away, and the weather was perfect for it—hot and clear, with a wispy breeze. Not that bad weather would have kept us at home; the senior class had graduated the previous night, and most of them would be at the beach today, nursing hangovers and kicking off their last summer of freedom before college with sunburns, volleyball and an endless rehash of grad-night parties.

      Lucy was fiddling with the radio, which was notoriously temperamental, and Cath was still half-asleep behind an enormous pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair riffling out the open window. I was curled in the backseat, my bare feet propped on the stack of beach towels, and was watching out the rear window as the crowded lanes of the parkway unwound behind us.

      The summer stretched ahead, and I wasn’t sure I could face it yet. Cath would spend the weeks sleeping until she couldn’t take the heat in her attic bedroom any more, and then haunt the library and the record store downtown most afternoons. Lucy’s job at the day camp would begin next week, and she had already informed us that she intended to paint her bedroom, too. Both Cath and I knew that she would also plow through every book on the senior reading list, and probably volunteer at the children’s hospital in Mountainside, as well. Lucy, a one-girl compendium of achievements, had anticipated college applications for two years now.

      And for the first time since I was twelve, I not only needed to find something to fill the months before school started again, I also had to consider applying to college. To study what, I had no idea. Nothing appealed to me. College didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend the summer in bed, with the blinds drawn against the sun and the fan spinning in lazy circles above my head. Secretly, spending the rest of my life just that way didn’t sound awful.

      I looked down at my knee as Lucy pulled in to the crowded parking lot at the beach, and examined the scar that cut through it. It was still angry, a jagged pink arrow pointing to the fact that my life had changed irrevocably in one afternoon. My parents liked to remind me that I was lucky to be able to walk, but I didn’t care much about that. If I was going to be curled up in bed for weeks at a time, hypnotized by daytime TV and drinking diet soda by the gallon, two functional legs probably wouldn’t be necessary.

      “We’re here,” Lucy said, jerking on the emergency brake as the car shuddered to a halt. “Cath, wake up.”

      “I’m up,” Cath mumbled, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head and squinting out at the sparkling water. “God, it’s bright.”

      I climbed out of the back when Cath got out, stretching her arms over