The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V. E. Schwab Page 0,105

and Henry drags himself back.

“Find everything you need?” Her eyes are already milky with shine.

“Oh yes,” the woman says with a warm smile, and he wonders what she sees instead of Henry. Is he a son, or a lover, a brother, a friend?

Addie leans her elbows on the counter.

She taps the book he’s been turning through between customers. A collection of modern candids in New York.

“I noticed the cameras at your place,” she says. “And the photographs. They’re yours, aren’t they?”

Henry nods, resists the urge to say It’s just a hobby, or rather, It was a hobby, once.

“You’re very good,” she says, which is nice, especially coming from her. And he’s fine, he knows; maybe even a little better than fine, sometimes.

He took headshots for Robbie back in college, but that was because Robbie couldn’t afford a real photographer. Muriel called his photos cute. Subversive in their conventional way.

But Henry wasn’t trying to subvert anything. He just wanted to capture something.

He looks down at the book.

“There’s this family photo,” he says, “not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so … happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

“Why did you stop?”

Because time doesn’t work like photos.

Click, and it stays still.

Blink, and it leaps forward.

He always thought of taking photos as a hobby, an art class credit, and by the time he figured out that it was something you could do, it was too late. Or at least, it felt that way.

He was too many miles behind.

So he gave up. Put the cameras on the shelf with the rest of the abandoned hobbies. But something about Addie makes him want to pick one up again.

He doesn’t have a camera with him, of course, only his cell phone, but these days, that is good enough. He lifts it up, framing Addie at rest, the bookshelves rising at her back.

“It won’t work,” she says, right as Henry takes the picture. Or tries. He taps the screen, but there’s no click, no capture. He tries again, and this time the phone takes the photo, but it is a blur.

“I told you,” she says softly.

“I don’t get it,” he says. “It was so long ago. How could he have predicted film, or phones?”

Addie manages a sad smile. “It’s not the technology he tampered with. It’s me.”

Henry pictures the stranger, smiling in the dark.

He sets the phone down.

New York City

September 5, 2013

V

Henry wakes to the blare of morning traffic.

He winces at the sound of car horns, the sunlight streaming through the window. He reaches for the memories of last night, and for a second, comes up with nothing, a flat black slate, a cottony silence. But when he squeezes his eyes shut, the darkness cracks, gives way to a wave of pain and sadness, a medley of broken bottles and heavy rain, and a stranger in a black suit, a conversation that must have been a dream.

Henry knows that Tabitha said no—that part was real, the memory too stinging to be anything but true. That is, after all, why he started drinking. The drinking is what led him home through the rain, to rest on the stoop before going inside, and that is where the stranger—but no, that part didn’t happen.

The stranger and their conversation, that was the stuff of stories, a clear subconscious commentary, his demons played out in mental desperation.

A headache thuds dully in Henry’s skull, and he scrubs at his eyes with the back of one hand. A metal weight knocks against his cheek. He squints up and sees a dark leather band around his wrist. An elegant analog watch, with gold numerals set against an onyx ground. On its face, a single golden hand rests the barest fraction off of midnight.

Henry has never worn a watch.

The sight of it, heavy and unfamiliar on his wrist, reminds Henry of a shackle. He sits up, clawing at the clasp, consumed by the sudden fear that it is bound to him, that it won’t come