And suddenly I understood something terrible. Preston had known about my son before I ever sat beside him on that sidewalk.
I kept reading. A funeral-home worker had been willing to look the other way for cash. A few bills, a side door left unlocked, a warning about when the room would be empty. They slipped in shortly before the casket was closed for the last time. And they took the camera.
I shoved my chair back so hard it scraped across the floor. “No.”
My hands shook. I’d chosen that camera myself. Michael carried it everywhere: birthday parties, grocery runs. He photographed puddles, cracked sidewalks, birds on telephone wires, anything that caught his eye. Putting it beside him had felt right. Something he loved, going with him.
And Preston had helped steal it from his coffin.
For several seconds I couldn’t keep reading. I was furious. Not sad, not understanding. Furious. But the letter went on.
We planned to sell the camera immediately. After you walked away, I stared at that money and realized I was wearing your son’s jacket while helping sell something stolen from his coffin.
I covered my mouth. Something in me broke.
Preston couldn’t return the camera. The others would have known exactly who took it, and he was frightened of what they might do. So before they sold it, he removed the memory card and hid it. That same night, he left.
Your kindness did not magically make me a good man, Helen. But it was the first time in years anyone treated me like I might still be worth becoming one.
His life changed slowly after that, he wrote. Eventually he became successful enough to find people he’d once thought impossible to find. He didn’t explain how, only that he’d finally found me. Then came one line by itself.
The camera belonged to your son. The memories belonged to you.
Preston apologized. He said perhaps the photographs would show nothing I hadn’t already seen. For a moment I considered closing everything. Then I clicked the folder.
Preston thought he was returning Michael’s photographs. He had no idea he was returning a secret Michael had taken to his grave.
I opened the first picture. Michael was making a face at the camera, eyes crossed, cheeks puffed. A laugh escaped before I could stop it. “Oh, sweetheart.”
The rest came slowly. Me in the kitchen with flour on my shirt. The house across the street after a snowfall. A crooked shot of our Christmas tree. A pigeon on a trash can that Michael had apparently considered worthy of preserving forever. By the tenth picture I was crying and smiling at once.
Then a woman appeared. She stood beside Michael outside a coffee shop, smiling into the lens. I frowned. I’d never seen her. A coworker, maybe, or someone from school.
Another photo: she was wearing Michael’s gray sweatshirt. Another: they were holding hands. Another: Michael looked at her, not the camera, with an expression I recognized at once.
He loved her.
That hurt in a way I hadn’t expected. My son had been in love, and I’d known nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
I clicked again and stopped breathing. Michael knelt in front of the woman. She was visibly pregnant. His hands rested on either side of her stomach, and he was kissing the curve of it.
I stopped crying. For several seconds I only stared. Then I clicked again: Michael behind her, arms around her waist. An ultrasound image. Then several photographs that were unmistakably a maternity shoot.
I grabbed a sheet of paper and began checking dates, my fingers trembling as I counted backward. Michael had died months before that baby would have been born.
“Who are you?” I whispered to the woman on the screen. Was the baby Michael’s? Why hadn’t he told me? Had he planned to?
Then came the question that made my heart pound harder than all the others. What if that child was still out there?
I had lost Michael once without knowing the whole story. I wasn’t going to walk away from it now. Somewhere in those photographs was a woman who might have carried my son’s child. And I was going to find her.
I stopped looking at the pictures like a mother and started looking at them like evidence. I pulled a notebook close and went through every image again, writing down anything that might matter: dates, street signs, storefronts, names on envelopes, anything printed clearly enough to read.
