Chapter 19

The photograph on my table wasn't evidence in the usual sense. Evidence points to a culprit, connects facts, builds logic. This piece of glossy paper did the opposite — it was breaking into me from the inside.

I sat under the lamp almost all night, studying the print. But I wasn't looking at the unfamiliar man in the red circle. I was looking at myself.

The man in the photo felt like a stranger to me, a double who'd stolen my name. I dug into the mundane details with my eyes, trying to grab hold of anything tangible. There were the old scratched-glass watch — still ticking on my wrist right now. There was the jacket, its left sleeve still showing a tiny cigarette-ember burn hole, scorched in some pub I also didn't remember. Old trainers with a dirty white sole. The posture — slightly turned, relaxed. And the smile.

I stared into that smile until my eyes started to water. It wasn't the reflexive grimace people give for a random snapshot. My eyes in the photo weren't fixed on empty space. They were alive, warm. I was looking at the person holding the camera. I was smiling at him.

07:15

I called Helen the moment the grey London morning began seeping through the blinds. She picked up on the first ring, as if she hadn't slept at all.

"Helen, I know what's missing from that photograph."

"What?" her voice came out hoarse on the line, compressed with exhaustion.

"The photographer."

Forty minutes later she was at my place. We spread the photograph out on the kitchen table, right under the pale morning light coming through the window. We stopped analyzing faces. We started analyzing the geometry of the shot. The direction of the shadows. The angle of the sunlight. The reflections in the window glass of the Harris & Croft building behind us.

And it was there, in the reflection of the heavy glass entrance door, that we found something strange.

The sun stood high, behind the photographer's back, and the glass surface of the door worked like an imperfect, dark mirror. In that reflection you could clearly make out the silhouette of a person with a camera raised to their face. You could see an elbow bent, a solid shoulder, the outline of a jacket. Where the head should have been, the glass stayed blurred — too much backlight.

"A developing defect?" I asked, feeling a familiar dull nausea start building inside me.

Helen shook her head slowly.

"No. Look closer at how he's holding his hands."

I took an old magnifying glass out of a drawer. No digital zoom — just a piece of curved glass, bringing the grain of the photo paper closer.

I trained the loupe on the dark reflection of the photographer's hands. The grain blurred, but the outline of the object in his fingers became obvious. The person wasn't holding a heavy DSLR up to their face, or a compact digital camera. It was the distinctive, boxy shape of cheap plastic. The characteristic bump of a flash unit. A yellow-green rim on the plastic housing.

A disposable Kodak. That exact one.

Helen silently reached into her bag, took out the very disposable camera we'd found in the hiding place, and set it carefully on the table, right beside the glossy print.

On the bottom edge of the plastic body, right by the battery cover, a deep, uneven scratch showed dark — the mark left by someone once forcing it open with a knife or a screwdriver. A distinctive, jagged gouge, impossible to mistake for a factory defect or accidental wear.

I picked up the loupe again and pointed it at the reflection in the glass door in the photograph. Right where the photographer's fingers gripped the bottom of the plastic body, the dark glass of the door showed exactly the same tiny, jagged white mark.

The scratch matched down to the millimeter.

We both fell silent.

"Harris," I said quietly. Not a question — a statement of fact. "He's the one holding the camera. He took this photo."

Helen raised her eyes to me. She'd already understood.

"He took the camera from you. That exact day. The last photograph before everything ended. You gave him the camera, stood next to him," she paused. "And smiled."

The air in the kitchen turned as thick as cement. I looked at my own smiling face in the photograph and understood one simple, devastating thing. I remembered absolutely nothing — a complete, ringing blank — about this man standing beside me. Didn't remember his hand on my shoulder. Didn't remember him raising the camera and looking through the viewfinder.

I didn't remember that day at all.

And that's when, for the first time in all these weeks, rage woke up in me. Real, hot, human anger. Not at the erased databases. At myself.

"Why don't I remember anything?!" I snapped, and my own voice sounded foreign to me in the quiet kitchen. "What the hell was I standing there for, smiling, shaking his hand, if all of it's been erased?! Who gave anyone the right to cut pieces out of my own head?!"

I slammed my fist down on the table. The cups rattled, and the light, glossy photograph jumped from the impact, flipped into the air, and landed back on the table's plastic surface.

Face down.

I went still, breathing hard, staring at the greyish back of the photo paper.

There were no Kodak factory stamps. No date. Right in the center of the sheet, slightly at an angle, two words showed dark. They'd been written in ballpoint pen — broad strokes, with a distinctive heavy pressure and a particular, angular slant to the letters.

It was my own handwriting.

DON'T DEVELOP.