Dominic woke the way she imagined soldiers woke. No blinking. No stretch. One second he was asleep and the next his eyes were open and fixed on her, and his hand had already closed over the photograph.
"The power's out," Ana said. Her voice came out normal. She was proud of that. "I brought candles."
"I see that."
"You were asleep."
"I gathered." He sat back. He turned the photograph face down on the desk, carefully, the way you'd cover something that might catch cold. "Thank you. You can leave them."
She didn't move.
Outside, the storm threw a fresh load of rain at the glass. One of the candles guttered. Ana set them down on the corner of his desk, one, two, three, and stood there with her hands empty.
"Who is she?" she asked.
For a moment she thought he would refuse. She could see him decide. She had watched clients do this a hundred times, the second where they chose between the true answer and the expensive one.
"My mother," he said. "Isabel."
"She's beautiful."
"She was." He looked at the back of the photograph as if he could see through it. "I was a year old when she died. That's the only picture I have where she's laughing."
"Where was it taken?"
That was the question. She heard it land. His eyes came up to hers, light grey, and for the first time since she'd met him they were not cool at all. They were tired, and wary, and somewhere underneath that, very young.
"I don't know," he said. "I found it in my grandfather's safe after he died. In February. There's nothing written on the front. I've been trying to place the shop."
Ana's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Tell him, said a voice in her head that sounded a lot like Mateo. It's your bakery. It's your father. Tell him now.
"It's a coincidence," Dominic said, misreading her silence. His voice had gone flat again, the arctic back in place. "You look a little like her. Around the eyes. I noticed it at the café, and I was... I'm aware of how that sounds. It has nothing to do with the contract. Forget it."
As if either of them had ever forgotten anything on request.
"Okay," Ana heard herself say.
It was the wrong answer, and she knew it while she was saying it. She said it anyway. She took one candle back, left him two, and walked down the dark hallway to the gold side with her heart going hard against her ribs and her father's young face burning behind her eyes.
She didn't sleep. At six she took the service lift down, because the main lifts were still out, and walked nine blocks south through puddles that came over her shoes.
Corliss Avenue was waking up. The laundromat. The phone repair place with its sun-bleached posters. The striped awning, green and white now because she'd chosen new canvas three summers ago, but the letters on the glass were the same. REYES BAKERY. EST. 1987.
Her father was at the bench in the back, shaping dough. Tomás Reyes was sixty-two, round-shouldered, with forearms like loaves and a moustache that had been grey since she was in primary school. The radio was on. The oven ticked.
"Mija!" He lifted floury hands. "You walked? In this? Your husband has no car?"
"He has six cars."
"Then why are your feet wet?"
She sat on the flour sacks the way she had when she was small. She'd planned this conversation for nine blocks and none of it would come out in order, so she just took out her phone and showed him the picture she'd taken of the photograph, in the candlelight, before she'd left the study.
She hadn't told herself she was going to do that. Her thumb had done it.
Her father looked at the screen.
He didn't say anything for so long that the oven timer went off. He didn't move to answer it. Flour drifted down off his hands onto the floor.
"Papi."
"Where did you get this?"
"Who is she?"
He took the phone from her. He held it close, then far, the way he held recipe cards now that his eyes were going. His thumb touched the woman's face on the screen, very lightly, and Ana felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
"Isabel," he said.
"You knew her."
"A long time ago." He handed the phone back. His voice had gone hoarse, the way it did when he talked about her mother, who had been gone eleven years. "She came to buy bread. Many times. That's all."
"That's not all."
"Ana."
"She's standing in front of our shop with one of our cake boxes, and you're right there beside her, laughing. And she's dead, Papi. She's my husband's mother, and she's dead, and he doesn't know where this was taken, and you just said her name like..."
"I know who she is." He turned away and pulled the trays from the oven at last. The conchas had gone too dark at the edges. He looked at them for a long moment, then dumped the whole tray in the bin, which she had never seen him do in her life. "Go home to your husband. I have a delivery at seven."
"Papi."
"I promised," her father said, to the bin, to the oven, to nobody. "Go home."
She went home. She went to the gold side of the map and sat on the floor of her closet with her laptop, because it was the only place that felt small enough, and she typed Isabel Hartley into the search bar for the first time.
There wasn't much. A society wedding announcement, 1990. Two charity photographs of a polished young stranger, taken years before Ana was born. And the obituary, short and expensive, the kind written by a family's lawyers. Isabel Hartley, beloved wife of Robert, mother of Dominic, killed in a single-car accident on the coast road on the night of March the third, 1993. Private funeral. In lieu of flowers.
March the third.
Ana opened the photograph on her phone again and zoomed in on the bakery window, the way she zoomed in on contracts, looking for the small print.
Behind the glass, in her father's blocky capitals, was a chalkboard she had grown up seeing every single spring. He chalked it on Palm Sunday, never a day earlier, because her grandmother had believed anything earlier was bad luck.
CLOSED EASTER SUNDAY. HAPPY EASTER FROM THE REYES FAMILY.
She checked the calendar for 1993 with fingers that didn't feel like hers.
Palm Sunday that year fell on the fourth of April. A full month after Isabel Hartley had died on the coast road, someone had stood on Corliss Avenue and photographed her laughing.