One evening after dinner, after the children were asleep and the kitchen was finally quiet, I walked through the farmhouse turning off lights. In the living room the old photographs still lined the mantel, but now there were new ones among them. Helena standing proudly by the office door with her first employee badge clipped to her shirt. Clare on graduation day from her GED program, thinner than she should have been but smiling without flinching this time. Natalie holding Owen in the garden, both of them laughing at something beyond the frame. A new resident named Tori receiving the keys to her first apartment in town. Another woman hugging her sister at the bus station after three months of silence and one protective order.
I touched the frame nearest the end of the row.
It was a photograph of George, rare enough that it almost startled me even now. Helena had found it tucked into one of the office files. He was younger, standing near the barn before we married, one hand braced on the fence rail, not smiling exactly but softer than I had ever seen him in public. I placed my fingers against the glass and said, quietly, because some habits of privacy die hard: