My father had not been in the photograph.

There was only my mother, tired and smiling, looking down at a child who knew nothing yet about secrets or loss.

“Can I keep this one?” I asked.

“It was always yours.”

After she left, I placed it on the hallway shelf, beside a photograph from our recent day trip.

In the first image, she held me.

In the second, we stood shoulder to shoulder beneath a wide blue sky.

The years between them were invisible in the space of a few inches, but I knew what they contained.