Then Ellie stopped turning pages.
Her smile disappeared.
“Who’s this?”
My stomach tightened before I even looked.
David.
Forty-two years had passed, but I still recognized every detail.
His rented black tuxedo.
His crooked bow tie.
The nervous smile he always wore whenever someone pointed a camera at him.
And me beside him in a pale blue dress, looking absolutely certain that life was going to turn out exactly the way we had planned.
“His name was David,” I said quietly.
Ellie looked at me.
“Was he your boyfriend?”
“My first serious boyfriend.”
“Before Grandpa?”
“Long before Grandpa.”
She studied the photograph again.
“You were really pretty.”
“Were?”
She grinned.
David and I had been together since sophomore year.
We were the kind of teenagers who believed that because we had made a plan, the universe was somehow required to cooperate.
He worked evenings at his father’s hardware store.
