She came in, set her cleaning supplies on the floor, and began.
She dusted the bookshelves. She wiped the window. She cleaned the surface of the desk in long, careful strokes, moving around the closed laptop and the neat stack of papers.
Then she turned to the wall of photographs.
She had cleaned those frames before, 2 weeks earlier on her first Thursday. She worked along the row, lifting each frame, wiping the glass, replacing it exactly.
She reached the photograph of the 3 teenagers.
She lifted it off the wall.
She wiped the glass.
She was about to put it back when her eye caught the writing on the side of the frame. Not on the back as she had thought before, but along the inner edge where the photograph had slipped very slightly to 1 side within the frame, revealing a narrow strip of the back of the photograph.
Faded pencil.
3 names in a line.
She tilted the frame to read them.
Benjamin. Simon. Victoria.
She went very still.
She looked at the photograph through the clean glass. The girl on the right was slightly turned, laughing, hair loosely tied.
Rebecca looked at that face and the world became very, very quiet.