The Woman Who Kept the Wrong Photographs

Grandma Odalys kept a photo album that nobody else in the family was allowed to touch, and for most of her life, Camille had assumed this was simply the ordinary possessiveness of an old woman who didn't trust her grandchildren's sticky fingers around old paper.

She learned the truth the week Odalys died, when the task of sorting the apartment fell, as these things always do, to whichever grandchild lived closest and answered her phone the most reliably.

The album was full of photographs of people Camille didn't recognize — which wasn't unusual, in itself, for a woman who'd outlived two husbands and most of her friends. What was unusual was that every single photograph had been taken at night, in what looked like the same unremarkable street corner, and every single person in every photograph was looking directly at the camera with an expression Camille could only describe, uncomfortably, as relieved.

On the back of each photograph, in her grandmother's careful handwriting, was a date and a single word: SAFE.

Camille counted forty-three photographs spanning sixty years. Forty-three strangers, forty-three nights, forty-three small, careful annotations confirming that whatever had needed to happen at that street corner had, on that occasion, gone the way it was supposed to.

She found the address on the back of the album's final page, along with one line that wasn't a photograph caption at all, written more recently than the rest, in a hand grown shaky with age: someone has to keep watch, and now it has to be you.

Camille has not yet decided what she's going to do with that address.

But she has noticed, in the weeks since, that she's started waking up at exactly 3 a.m. every night, for no reason she can name — and that some nights, she finds herself standing at the window, looking out at a street corner three blocks from her own apartment that she is almost certain she has never visited before.