It was like looking into a mirror that showed the past.
My body understood what it was seeing several seconds before my mind would let itself say the word, and in the gap between the two, I stood frozen with my hand halfway to my own tie, and the whole carefully arranged evening — the ring, the conservatory, the two hundred guests, the woman I was about to marry — quietly stopped mattering, all at once, and I did not yet know why.
Chapter 3 — So Have We
One of the boys caught me staring at them through the mirror.
He had gray-blue eyes, and he narrowed them at me the way a child does when an adult is being strange.
“Mister,” he said, “why are you copying us?”
“I’m not,” I said.
My voice came out wrong.
We were all facing the glass now, the four of them and me, five faces stacked in the same mirror under the same hard light.
And I looked, really looked, and the floor of my life quietly gave way.
The same gray-blue eyes, all five sets.
The same sharp line of the chin.
And on the left cheek of each of them, the same small dimple I had seen in my own childhood photographs a thousand times, the one my mother used to press with her fingertip.
“I’ve always done that,” I heard myself whisper.