It began innocently: he was searching for his wife’s passport. The Chases were planning their first trip to Italy together. To celebrate their tenth anniversary. Leonard’s own much-worn passport was exactly where he always kept it, but Valerie’s less frequently used passport didn’t appear to be with it, so Leonard looked through drawers designated as hers, bureau drawers, desk drawers, the single shallow drawer of the cherrywood table in a corner of their bedroom which Valerie sometimes used as a desk, and there, in a manila folder, with a facsimile of her birth certificate and other documents, he found the passport. And pushed to the back of the drawer, a packet of photographs held together with a frayed rubber band. Polaroids. Judging by their slightly faded colors, old Polaroids. Leonard shuffled through the photographs as if they were cards. He was staring at a young couple: Valerie and a man whom Leonard didn’t recognize.
