The green dress I’d saved up for was still in Claire’s bedroom when my phone slid beneath her couch. I reached into the narrow gap and pulled out something bearing my own eight-year-old face. Then I noticed a note in Claire’s handwriting dated the exact day we matched on Tinder—and realized she’d known who I was before I knew anything about her.
My phone had disappeared between Claire’s couch cushion and the armrest while she was in the bedroom changing into the green dress I’d bought her.
I muttered something I definitely wouldn’t repeat around my mother and pushed my hand into the gap.
My fingers brushed against two quarters, a pen cap, something that felt disturbingly like a fossilized potato chip, and finally my phone.
But when I pulled my hand free, a photograph came out with it.
It dropped facedown onto the rug.
I picked it up automatically.
Then I stopped.
The photograph was old enough that the colors had started fading along the edges. A group of children sat on what appeared to be a library floor, each holding a book.
Near one end of the row sat a skinny boy with uneven brown hair and a missing front tooth.
