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Her head bobbed with enthusiasm. “I mean, what a find! There are photos of every room, every wall. Someone really loved this house, really wanted to document it. There’re pictures of the family too. Wanna see?”

Still staring hard at the cover, Nico was barely registering her words.

Not only was he glad to find the album for personal reasons, but it might help his mother find her memories again, even if only briefly.

But how could he do that without telling Ginny the truth?

A gentle tug on the album brought him back to the present.

“Sure, sure,” he said, releasing it to her.

She flipped through several of the stiff pages, stopping on the first of the family photos.

How long had it been since he’d seen these?

Two and a half decades? On rainy days and quiet evenings, he and his brother snuggled side-by-side on the floor or in one of their beds, staring at the pictures.

Then one day it no longer sat in its spot on the bookshelf.

His mother had proclaimed it gone, lost forever, and that had been that. But Nico had never forgotten it.

Gazing again at the first set of old photos, Nico knew the separation of years made no difference. The images were burned into his memory. To Ginny, of course, they were just some random, smiling family.

She pointed at the top left picture. In it, they all sat around the kitchen booth. Nico’s three-year-old face grinned goofily back at its adult self.

“Look, here they are,” she said excitedly, as if introducing him to her best friends.

“These are the people who put the love in this house. A mom, a dad, two boys, and another lady—maybe a sister of the mom or dad? At first, I thought this child was a girl, the hair is so long, but in the later pictures you can see its two boys, twins even.”

Nico couldn’t help an inner chuckle. Vince had been so terrified of scissors that he’d refused a haircut.

That all ended the day a well-meaning, gray-haired lady at the department store had gushed over how cute Nico’s “sister” would look in a pink polka dot dress.

Vince cried all the way to the barber shop, where he demanded to look like a boy.

Ginny patted the photo lightly with the tip of one finger. “I could probably find out who they are if I looked into it, but I haven’t wanted to. I like keeping them preserved here, just the way they were. Real people are so much messier than imaginary ones. I like their anonymity.”

“Smart move,” Nico said. He’d intended for the words to sound casual, but emotion was pulling his vocal cords taut as a violin’s bow.

Ginny trained her green eyes at him, one eyebrow just barely arched. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Darn. Get ahold of yourself, Nico! He wasn’t usually so easy to read. “It’s nothing. I’m just agreeing. People are messy.” He raised a finger in the air as if a thought had just come to him. “I wonder, though, if I might borrow the album for a day? I promise to bring it back.”

This was a lie, of course. He would never bring it back.

Ginny lay the album in her lap, her pretty lips pressed tightly over her teeth, apparently weighing his request. She opened the album to a double page of family photos he hadn’t seen in forever, and Nico found it difficult not to stare.

He so wanted to lean forward and experience those images again, but he couldn’t let himself, not yet.

First, he had to get her to “loan” him the album.

She might never do that if she knew what it meant to him.

“Nico,” she said finally, “you went white as a sheet when you pulled the album out. That’s not the sort of thing guys with hardly anything in their medicine cabinets do. What’s going on?”

He lifted his hands in a shrug. “Nothing. I just didn't know what I’d find under your bed!” When she looked at him skeptically, he added, “And I like vintage things.”

She resettled her small frame against her pillow but kept her eyes firmly on him. “We both know that’s a lie.” She tapped her fingers on the album pages for several seconds, staring at him now with narrowed eyes. Nico squirmed internally, hoping she wouldn’t make the connection.

“And why did you want to know all those details about the nails in the storage bench?” she asked.

“I…I don’t know. It…just seemed odd, that’s all.”

She began muttering to herself. “You say you own this house…you have a brother…you seemed very upset over not being allowed inside, and now you’re a mess over this family album.” Her eyes flew all the way open. “This is you in these pictures! You lived here as a little boy!”

Nico let out the hot air balloon-sized breath he’d been holding. Whatever it might do to future negotiations, the jig was up. She’d figured it out. At least now maybe he had a better chance of bringing the photo album to his mother.

He sat back in his chair. “Yes.”

“But why didn't you tell me that from the start?”

“I thought it would give you leverage in financial dealings if you knew I had an emotional attachment to the property.”

Her eyebrows knit together in confusion. “First off, I made it clear I have no interest in financial dealings. But also, I assume you plan to tear the house down. Am I wrong about that?”

“It’s in the way of a massive real estate parcel that my brother and I have been working on for nearly ten years. We own all the surrounding properties, and I thought we still owned our childhood home, too.”

“You own the old factory and the old mall?” When he nodded, she whistled in appreciation. “I sure am a fly in your ointment, aren’t I?” She made a buzzing sound.

He had to laugh a little at that. “You sure are. Now, where’s my fly swatter.”

She gestured toward her ankle. It was turning a ripe shade of blue. “I swatted myself.”

“You did,” he said simply, and they lapsed into silence.

“Okay,” Ginny said finally, “but then why would I think your emotional attachment to the house matters? You obviously don’t have an emotional attachment to it or, if you do, it’s not nearly as strong an attachment as you have to all the money you’ll make from destroying it.”

Nico paused to think about that. “Maybe I thought you were the emotional type so…no, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?”

Ginny shook her head slowly in an ‘I told you so’ kind of way, but her expression was gentle. Her eyes and the soft set of her lips radiated sympathy. “Look, there’s a more likely reason you kept your true connection to the house secret from me.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll tell you, but I'm sick of lying in this bed. How about you get started making us some coffee while I pogo myself toward the kitchen.”

Considering how recently he’d written Ginny off as an incompetent fool, Nico found himself surprisingly interested in her theory but, at the moment, he was even more keen to keep her from reinjuring herself. “Fine, but I’m going to help you get to the kitchen.”