Page 88 of Key West Homecoming

“My grandmother’s wedding ring and a notebook she kept were also in the safe deposit box. There was a picture too.”

“Of what?”

“Me with my father. We were here at the cottage. I was four.”

Jake waited.

“He was laughing,” Emma said. “I don’t remember the picture being taken, but Gloria wrote on the back that it was the summer he taught me to swim.”

“Do you remember that?”

“A little. My memory is fuzzy.”

Jake saw her eyes change and didn’t ask anything else.

After a moment, Emma reached into her tote and took out the cardboard sleeve.

“Would you like to see it?”

“I would.”

She slid the photograph free and handed it to him.

Jake held it carefully by the edges. Emma was a little girl in a red bathing suit, grinning at the camera while a young man crouched beside her with one hand on her shoulder. Jake looked from David’s face to Emma’s and could see the resemblance.

“He looks happy,” Jake said.

Emma looked at the photograph in his hands. “He does.”

“He looks happy to be with you.”

Her eyes filled, but she smiled.

“My grandmother said he was a good father.”

“I think she was right.”

Jake handed the photograph back. Emma returned it to the sleeve and put it carefully into her tote.

They stood in the garden while the light softened around them.

“Thank you,” Emma said.

“For what?”

“The pergola. Yesterday. Letting me have the house to myself when I needed it. All of it.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“I know, but I want to.”

Jake looked at her. “Then you’re welcome.”

Emma smiled again.

She had cried enough in the last day that her eyes still looked tired, but there was something different in her face tonight. Jake couldn’t have explained it, and he wasn’t going to try. He only knew he liked seeing her standing in the garden as though she belonged there.

“I should go,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”