Charlotte looked at Tyler then. The slow, real smile that she had worn under prom lights in 2006 and that had remained, he now knew, exactly as it had been — carried through the years of her mother’s illness and the modeling career that ended before it started and the delivery routes through rain, unchanged by any of it.
There were a thousand words in the silence between them.
Later she slipped her hand into his, the way she had in the hallway in 2006, and said: “You kept those photographs all this time.”
“Uncle Ray kept them.”
“But you knew where to find them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He told her the plain truth.
“Because when the entire world had worked very hard to make me feel invisible, you made me feel like I was worth seeing.”
She
held his face in both hands.
“It’s my turn now,” she said. “The rest of my life making sure you don’t forget it.”
