Chapter 1
"Is the summer I remember mine?" She sets the photograph on your desk before you look up. The strip curtain is still swinging behind her. You put a finger on it and you know. The photograph is dry. Not dried out — never wet, not once. The corners are still sharp and there isn't a spot of mold anywhere on the emulsion. You run a hairdryer over your own letters three times a day and the ink walks off the paper anyway. Tonight is the second night of the damp. The wall behind you is sweating, water tracking down the grout, and the whole building sounds like it is slowly remembering something. Every sheet of paper in Slackwater is rotting. Hers isn't. The picture is a lake. A girl standing in reeds up to her chest, backlit, her face gone. You switch the hairdryer off. Now the only sound in the room is water finding its way down the wall. At the bottom of the drawer by your knee is the other thing that shouldn't exist: your own birth record, with a hospital printed on it. You went to that address once. The building came down eleven years before you were born. You have never told anyone that.