You can redecorate however you'd like," Callum said.
Victoria smiled.
She was already planning it.
She moved through the Reid house that evening like she was reacquainting herself with something that had always belonged to her — trailing her fingertips along the back of the living room sofa, pausing at doorways, cataloguing every room with the patient attention of a woman who had waited a very long time for this.
Most of it would go. Not all at once — she wasn't careless. Too sudden a change would alarm Callum's mother. Too thorough an erasure might nudge something in Callum's buried mind. She would do it gradually. Methodically. A new sofa. A repainted wall. New curtains where the old ones smelled like a perfume she refused to let linger in this house.
She stopped at the mantelpiece.
There was a photograph. Callum and Elara at some charity dinner three or four years ago, Elara tipped back laughing at something, Callum watching her with an expression that made Victoria's teeth meet.
She turned it face-down.
"Everything alright?" Callum appeared in the doorway, loosened tie, the tired look he'd carried since the accident. He wasn't the same as before — she'd known him before, known him well, and the Callum who came back from that hospital was slightly dimmer. Less warm. She didn't mind. She'd never needed warm.
"Perfect," she said, with the smile she'd calibrated to reach her eyes at exactly the right degree. "I'm just imagining possibilities."
He leaned against the doorframe. "I want you to feel at home here."
"I already do." She crossed the room toward him, put her hands flat against his chest. She felt him exhale. "I just — some of the choices in here. They're not really us. Are they?"
That small crease appeared between his brows. She'd studied it — the tell that a memory was trying to surface. She moved her hand up to his face before it could.
"We should have dinner," she said. "Just us. Celebrate properly."
The crease smoothed out.
"Whatever you'd like," he said.
— ✦ —
She found the box of photographs the next morning.
Diana Reid — Callum's mother, always an obstacle, always watching Victoria with those cool, knowing eyes — had apparently not gotten to them first. Every photograph of the marriage was still in the study. In albums. In frames. Even in a small wooden box on the shelf that smelled like cedar and old memories.
Victoria took everything down.
She was methodical about it. She wrapped each frame in tissue paper so nothing broke — she wasn't cruel, she was practical — and placed them in a storage box she labeled *Callum — Personal Misc.* She carried the box to the basement herself.
She almost missed one.
Behind a vase on the mantelpiece — small, half-hidden, nearly swallowed by shadow — a single photograph that must have slipped behind the vase at some point. Callum and Elara on a beach somewhere. Barefoot. His arm around her shoulders. Her face turned up to say something to him. Both of them entirely, helplessly alive.
Victoria reached for it.
"Victoria?" Callum's voice from upstairs. "The restaurant called — are you ready?"
She paused. Pulled her hand back.
"Coming," she called.
She left the room. She'd get it later.
She didn't get it later.
Two months passed. The photograph stayed.
Callum found it on a Wednesday morning in December — reaching behind the vase for a pen he'd knocked back there — and stood in the living room with it in his hands for six full minutes.
He didn't know why he couldn't put it down.
He didn't know why his chest felt strange.
He didn't know why, when he finally set it face-down on the mantle and walked away, he turned back three steps later and picked it up again.
He put it in his jacket pocket.
He told himself he'd throw it
away later.
He didn't throw it away.