The Photograph in the Attic

Imogen spent two weeks not knowing what to do. She went on a long walk every afternoon. She wrote, several times, partial letters to Anwen and tore them up. She did not, in those two weeks, tell her parents anything. What she had been told was — clearly — not the family story. Her father had been *at the lake* in 1974. Carys — the little girl whose hand had been wrapped around her father's hand in the photograph — had drowned. Her father, age nine, had been there. Her father had been an only child not because his mother had had complications, but because — Imogen now suspected — the family had quietly taken him out of the cousins' lives entirely after 1974. There had been a falling-out, Anwen had said. There had also, Imogen now thought, been a long protective silence — by his mother, by his father, by the family — to allow him to grow up without that summer following him into adulthood. He had, Imogen thought, accepted the silence. Possibly because the silence had been, for him, a kindness. Imogen — fifteen, thoughtful, careful — had to decide. She decided, in the end, that she would talk to her mother first. Her mother was, in her family, the careful one. Her mother had married into the family in 1995, twenty years after the lake. She had not been there. She had only, presumably, been told what she had needed to be told. Imogen sat with her mother on the back step on