“Where? There’s no wall space in there.”
Hannah runs her fingers over the embroidered message:Hope is an anchor for the soul.
“I’ll find a place,” she says, voice reverent as she carefully sets it aside. “What goodies are you finding?”
“Just some old pictures.”
Her excitement returns and she prances over, wrapping her arms around my neck from behind to look over my shoulder. “I wanna see.”
Together we flip through the pages. I find a picture of my mom and me on the day I graduated from basic training—Hannah tells me I have her eyes. An older picture of me and Dad earns a, “Well,youmay not have a daddy kink, buthedefinitely might’ve.”
We stumble across a dusty album at the bottom of the box documenting Nana and Pops’ wedding day where they were only nineteen years old.
“She was so pretty,” Hannah says, admiring an alternate wedding photo from the one on display in the cabin.
We filter past a few more until Hannah slows, pulling a framed portrait hidden beneath a stack of albums into view.
She points to the woman under Pops’ arm. “Who’s that?”
I blink at the picture, then at her. “That’s Nana.”
Her brows twitch. “That isnotthe same woman.”
I inspect the picture more closely, wondering if maybe I’m mistaken. But it’s clearly Nana and Pops—I’d know my own grandparents. They pose together on the dock, his arm flung over her shoulder. Probably taken a few years before she passed, if I had to guess.
“No, it’s definitely her,” I say.
“Huh…” Hannah goes quiet for a beat, swallows. “I guess I’ve only ever seen her in the wedding picture on the mantel. Never thought about what she looked like when she was older.”
“Makes sense,” I admit. “There’s, like, fifty years between that pictureand this one.”
She nods, looking intently at the image a final time before placing it back in the box.
Her eyes widen on a gasp as her arm shoots back inside. She pulls out a new photo and waves it in my face, a taunt. “And what do we have here?”
I take one look and grit my teeth, cursing my mother for feeling it necessary to share every picture she ever took with my grandparents. A teasing finger pokes me in the ribs and I try to swat the photo away, but Hannah’s too quick.
“I don’t know, Rowan. She looks like a heartbreaker.”
She plants herself on my lap, presenting the picture for mutual inspection like we’re two parents admiring our newborn for the first time.
Fourteen years ago. Senior prom. Me in a tux. My date, Amy Carson, in a fire-engine-red sparkly dress. The two of us posed in front of Mom’s azaleas back home.
I nuzzle my nose into Hannah’s hair. “Jealous, baby?”
She tuts. “Of this little hussy? Not at all. What even is her name? Let me guess. Crystal. Jenny. Rebec?—”
“Amy.”
“Amy.” She purses her lips, eyes slitted. “Of course that’s her name. I could take her.”
Stifling a smile, I ease the photo out of her hands amidst her protests and toss it back in the box before I use my mouth to shut her up.
“You shouldn’t be out hereby yourself.” Hannah jerks, head snapping toward me. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”
I plop down beside her on the stairs at the top of the dock. She’s in my hoodie again, knees tucked inside. The lake stretches out before us, smooth under the midnight sky, moon hidden beneath a blanket of clouds.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she admits. I figured as much when I rolled over and found her side ofthe bed empty.