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He looks nervous again, like the sentence escaped before he could dress it up properly.

“I’m cute?”

“Georgia likes tall guys.”

I turn back to the photo.

Renny’s smile. Paul’s younger face beside him. A bar patio behind them. Or this house. Somewhere warm. Somewhere I was not.

“Was he tall?” I ask.

Paul shrugs. “Not really. Average.”

I turn the frame slightly, as if a better angle might reveal something.

“He had hazel eyes,” Paul says.

He looks almost embarrassed by the offering.

“So do I.”

“I know.”

I look back down because his face is too open, and I don’t know what to do with open from him. I set the first photo on my knee and pick up the next.

“He looks like a lot.”

“He was.”

“You loved that?”

Paul looks toward the window, then says, “He loved things loudly. It made it easier for me to just be still.”

I put the photo down carefully and pick up another.

In this photo, Renny is older than the last. Still good-looking. Still full of himself in the best and worst ways. His smile is cocked, almost challenging, like he is waiting for the person taking the picture to say something back.

“Did you know?”

Paul goes very still. I don’t look at him. The photo is easier.

“Know what?”

“About me.”

The question has been in me since the party. Since that moment under the pergola when we stood too close and the air felt like fighting energy. Maybe not physical battle, but a sensation similar enough to leave a mark. I realize it’s the truest question I’ve wanted to ask in all these months of lawyer tag.

Paul’s silence answers first. At least, it feels like it does.

Then he says, “No.”

“Really?”

He inhales.

“I didn’t know until he passed. Renny kept secrets. I knew that much. But I never… I found the letters to you and your mom in a shoebox.”

“So nobody knew but the two of them?”