The cashier took it slowly.
The moment he looked at it, his face went completely pale.
His hand trembled around the photo. His eyes snapped from the picture to me, then toward the glass door.
"Hey," I said carefully. "It's okay. I'm not trying to scare you."
He did not answer.
"What's your name?" I asked again.
Without saying a single word, he jumped over the counter and sprinted out of the gas station.
For half a second, I just stood there, my coffee cooling in my hand and my old photograph lying on the floor between us.
Then something in me broke loose.
I ran after him, having absolutely no idea that the next few hours were about to change everything I thought I knew about my life.
I shoved through the glass door so hard the bell above it shrieked.
The young cashier was already halfway across the lot, cutting between two parked trucks like someone who had spent his whole life knowing where the exits were. I chased him past the pumps, my dress shoes slipping near the curb.
"Wait!" I shouted. "Please, just wait!"
He glanced back, and for one strange second, I saw myself at 18 again. Not in a mirror. Not in a photograph.
Living, breathing, and terrified.
He darted behind the gas station toward a narrow dirt road lined with weeds. I was not young anymore, and my lungs burned before we reached the trees. Still, I ran. I had lost Nina once because I had not known she was leaving. I could not let this boy vanish, too.
He slowed near a chain-link fence, grabbed it, and bent over, gasping. I stopped several feet away with my hands raised.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said between breaths.
He gave a short, bitter laugh. "That's what people say before they do."
His words hit me harder than the run.
"Tell me your name."
He looked away.
"Please," I added. "I have been carrying questions for 17 years. You look like the answer to every single one."
His shoulders rose and fell. Finally, he whispered, "Evan."
"Evan," I repeated, and the name felt painfully unfamiliar. "How old are you?"
He rubbed his face with both hands. "Seventeen."
My chest tightened.
Seventeen.
The math formed before I wanted it to. Seventeen years since Nina disappeared. A boy with my eyes. A face that looked like it had been copied from an old photograph I still carried in my wallet.
