The purpose of the lock: to keep me out. It seems like an innocuous enough thing, but at second glance, I wonder if it would as easily lock someone in as lock someone out.

I call out to Imogen as I make my way down the steps, just to be sure. Downstairs, her shoes and her backpack are gone, as is her jacket.

Will has left breakfast for me on the counter and an empty mug for coffee. I fill the coffee mug and take it and my crepes to the table to eat. Only there do I see that Will has left his book behind, the true crime novel. He’s finished it, I assume, and left it for me to read.

I reach for the book and slide it toward myself. But it isn’t the book that I’m thinking about. Not really. It’s the photograph inside, that of his former fiancée. I take the book into my hands, take a deep breath and leaf through the pages, expecting Erin’s photo to fall out.

When it doesn’t, I leaf through again, a second and a third time.

I set the book down. I look up and sigh.

Will has taken the photograph. He’s taken the photograph and left the book for me.

Where has Will put the photograph?

I can’t ask Will. To bring Erin up again would be in poor taste. I can’t possibly nag him over and over again about his dead fiancée. She was long gone before I arrived. But the fact that he hangs on to her photograph after all these years is hard to stomach.

Will grew up on the Atlantic coast, not far from where we now live. He transferred colleges during his sophomore and junior years, leaving the East Coast for a school in Chicago. Between Erin’s death and his stepfather’s, Will told me, he couldn’t stand to stay out east anymore. He had to leave. Shortly after he did, his mother married for the third time (far too soon, in Will’s opinion; she’s the kind of woman who can’t ever be alone) and moved south. His brother joined the Peace Corps and now lives in Cameroon. Then Alice died. Will doesn’t have family on the East Coast anymore.

Erin and Will were high school sweethearts. He never used that term when he told me about her because it was too sentimental, too endearing. But they were. High school sweethearts. Erin was nineteen when she died; he’d just turned twenty. They’d been together since they were fifteen and sixteen. The way Will tells it, Erin, home from college for Christmas break—Will went to community college those first two years—had been missing overnight by the time her body was found. She was supposed to pick him up at six for dinner, but she never showed. By six thirty Will was getting worried. Near seven, he called her parents, her friends in quick succession. No one knew where she was.

Around eight o’clock, Erin’s parents made a call to the police. But Erin had only been gone two hours at that point and the police weren’t quick to issue a search. It was winter. It had snowed and the roads were slick. Accidents were plenty. The police had their work cut out for them that night. In the meantime, the police suggested Will and her parents keep calling around, checking out any place Erin was liable to be—which was ridiculous since a winter weather warning had been issued, urging drivers to stay off the roads that night.

The route Erin often took to Will’s was hilly and meandering, covered in a thin layer of ice and snow that wrapped around a large pond. It was off the beaten path, a scenic route best avoided when the weather took a turn for the worse as it had that night.

But Erin was always foolhardy, not the type, according to Will, that you could tell what to do.

At just thirty-two degrees, the pond where they later found her hadn’t had a chance to freeze through. It couldn’t bear the weight of the car when Erin hit a patch of ice and went soaring off the road.

That night, Will looked everywhere for Erin. The gym, the library, the studio where she danced. He drove every route he could possibly think of to get from Erin’s house to his. But it was dark out, and the pond was only a black abyss.

It wasn’t until early morning that a jogger spied the car’s fender sticking out of the ice and snow. Erin’s parents were notified first. By the time Will heard the news, more than twelve hours had passed since she hadn’t shown up for their date. Her parents were devastated, as was a little sister, only nine years old when she died. As was Will.

I push the book away from me. I don’t have the stomach to read it because I can’t see the book without thinking of the photo that was once tucked inside.

Where is he keeping Erin’s photograph? I wonder, but at the same time comes another thought: Why do I care?

Will married me. We have children together.

He loves me.

I leave my breakfast dishes where they are. I step from the kitchen, slip into a windproof jacket that hangs from a hallway hook. I need to go for a run, to blow off steam.

I head out onto the street. The skies this morning are gray, the ground moist from an early rainfall that’s drifted somewhere out to sea. I see the rain in the distance. Streaks of it hover beneath the base of the clouds. The world looks hopeless and bleak. By the end of the day, forecasters predict the rain will turn to snow.

I jog down the street. It’s a rare day off work. What I have in mind for it is a jog followed by a quiet morning alone. Otto and Tate have gone to school, Will to work. Will has no doubt caught the ferry by now, getting shuttled to the mainland. There he’ll catch a bus to campus, where he’ll rivet nineteen-year-olds about alternative energy sources and bioremediation for half the day, before gathering Tate from school and coming home.

I jog down the hill. I take the street that follows the perimeter of the island, moving past oceanfront properties. They’re not lavish, not by any means. Rather, they’re well-worn, lived in for generations, easily a hundred years old. Breezy cottages, rough around the edges, hidden amid the ample trees. It’s a five-mile loop around the island. The landscape isn’t manicured. It’s far more rural than that, with long stretches of backwoods and public beaches that are not only rugged and seaweed-swept, but eerily vacant this time of year.

I run fast. I have so much on my mind. I find myself thinking about Imogen, about Erin; about Jeffrey Baines and his ex-wife hiding in the church’s sanctuary. What were they talking about, I wonder, and where is Erin’s photograph? Has Will hidden it from me, or is he using it as a bookmark in his next novel? Is it something as auspicious as that?