I looked at it.
My breath caught.
It was my mother and Estelle.
Young.
Laughing.
Standing outside the old hardware store.
My mother was holding a loaf of bread.
Estelle was pointing at something outside the frame.
On the back, Estelle had written:
Two women who understood that having enough is not the same as having everything.
I turned the photograph over again.
My eyes filled with tears.
“Where did you find this?”
“Bottom of the wooden box.”
I looked at Albert.
“You kept this all these years?”
“I didn’t know who it belonged to.”
“And now?”
He smiled.
“Now I do.”
Lily looked between us.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said.
But it wasn’t nothing.
It was everything.
I looked at the photograph again.
For years, I had thought my mother had failed to protect me.
Then I thought she had simply been unlucky.
But now I understood.
She had done what she could with the knowledge and courage she had.
She had left pieces of a map.
Estelle had kept them safe.
Albert had carried them.
And somehow, when my own life collapsed, those pieces found their way back to me.
I thought about the night I first saw Albert.
