June kept the old photograph in the drawer beneath her scarves. She had not meant to take it out that morning. The rain did that to her. Rain made the house smell like cedar, dust, and the years she usually managed to keep folded away.
In the picture, she was thirty-one, barefoot on a dock, laughing at someone just outside the frame. Not her husband. That was the part she had never said aloud. The man behind the camera had been named Ellis, and he had touched her life for one summer with the careless confidence of someone who did not know he would become a secret.
At sixty-nine, June knew better than to romanticize pain. Still, she held the photo close and let herself remember the heat of that July, the sound of lake water, the way Ellis had looked at her like she was already free.
The doorbell rang once.
June did not move. Then it rang again.
When she opened the door, Ellis stood under a black umbrella, older, thinner, smiling like a man who had spent forty years finding the same address.
For a moment neither of them spoke. June noticed the rain on his collar, the little scar near his chin, the way his hands trembled around the umbrella handle.
She should have asked why he came. She should have mentioned her late husband, the neighbors, the cruel timing of old feelings arriving with wet shoes on the porch.
Instead she stepped back. Ellis looked down at the photograph still in her hand, and his smile broke a little. "I wondered if you kept it," he said.
June looked at the young woman in the picture, then at the old man at her door. "I wondered if you remembered taking it."
