She found it in the attic beneath the decorations and laughed at my hair, and there I was at eighteen in pale blue, and there beside me was Wesley. We had been together since sophomore year. He worked evenings at his father’s hardware store and saved for the community college and the flat he called the smallest apartment in America. Seven weeks after that photograph, the house burned before dawn. They pulled him out alive. Four days later his mother rang me crying and said he had not made it, and then the family moved away, and I was eighteen and eventually I stopped waiting.
Priya tapped his face and said that was the man at school who saved her a cookie after lunch. She said he had asked whether her grandmother was called Coralie.
