The first photo showed Evan crossing his eyes and puffing out his cheeks at the camera.
A laugh broke out of me before I could stop it.
“Oh, sweetheart.”
The next pictures came slowly. Me in the kitchen, flour dusted across my apron. Our old blue house half-buried in snow. A crooked shot of the Christmas tree. A squirrel on the fence that Evan had apparently decided deserved to be immortalized.
By the tenth photo I was laughing and crying at the same time.
Then a young woman appeared in the frame.
She stood beside Evan outside a diner, laughing at something off-camera.
I didn’t recognize her. Maybe a classmate. Maybe someone from his part-time job.
The next picture showed her wearing Evan’s gray hoodie.
The next, they were holding hands.
The next, Evan was looking at her instead of the lens, with an expression I knew instantly.
He was in love.
That realization hurt in a way I hadn’t braced for.
My son had fallen in love, and I had never known a single thing about it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered to the screen.
I clicked again and forgot how to breathe.
Evan was kneeling in front of her. Her stomach was round beneath her shirt. His hands rested gently against the curve of it, his forehead pressed to the fabric.
I stopped crying altogether.
I clicked through the rest almost mechanically. Evan standing behind her, arms wrapped around her waist. An ultrasound image, grainy and gray. A handful of photos that were unmistakably a homemade maternity shoot in someone’s backyard.
I grabbed a notepad and started working out dates, my fingers trembling as I counted backward.
Evan had died months before that baby would have been born.
“Who are you?” I asked the woman frozen on the screen.
Was the baby his? Had he been planning to tell me? Had he run out of time?
And then the question that made my pulse roar in my ears: What if that child was still out there, somewhere, right now?
I stared at the photographs a while longer. Then I pulled the notepad closer.
