The rules, Mira decided on Friday morning, needed to be revised.

Not abandoned. Revised. There was a difference, and it was important to maintain it, because abandoning them would mean acknowledging that they'd never been workable, and she wasn't ready to do that yet. Revising them meant acknowledging that the initial version had been drafted under stress, without full information, and could stand to be updated now that the situation had clarified itself.

The situation had clarified itself as follows: she had signed up for a project that would require her to spend eight weeks working in close proximity to Noel Ashbourne. This was not ideal. It was also, she had concluded after two nights of very little sleep, not something she could undo without drawing exactly the kind of attention she didn't want to draw. Dropping the project in the first week, after having signed up, would be noticed. Vasquez would ask why. The department was small. People would remember.

So. Revised rules.

No Blue Finch Café — this one held. The café was emotionally loaded in ways the project didn't require. They could meet in the library, or the studio, or anywhere that didn't carry the specific weight of everything she remembered about that corner table.

No Morrow Bridge — this one also held, with the amendment that *no Morrow Bridge unless required by the project*, at which point she would handle it professionally and carefully and not in any way that revealed how much she knew about that particular stretch of railing.

Keep the collaboration professional — this was new, replacing the more absolute *no contact* that had clearly been unenforceable from day one. Professional meant: work-related conversation, structured meeting times, the kind of relationship that ended cleanly at the semester's conclusion.

Do not let him learn her the way he'd learned her before — this was the most important one, and the most difficult to operationalize, because what it really meant was: do not be interesting to him. Do not say the things that had made him look at her the way he'd looked at her, across seven years, like she was something he was still in the process of discovering. Do not be the person he'd loved. Be a colleague. Be functional and competent and slightly boring.

She looked at this rule for a long time.

The problem with it was that she had, in their two brief interactions, already said the thing about the right-angle and he had been thinking about it since. Which was not boring. Which was, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that had started them the first time around — the way she saw light, the way she thought about images, which had been apparently one of the first things about her that had interested him.

She crossed out *slightly boring* and replaced it with *professionally competent but not personally revealing.*

This was going to be very hard.

---

Their first project meeting was in the Glass Library, at the long tables near the east windows. Mira arrived four minutes early and arranged her things with more precision than was strictly necessary — notebook, camera, the project brief she'd printed and annotated. She was in the middle of questioning whether the annotating had been a mistake when he arrived, three minutes early, carrying a rolled-up map and a coffee.

He sat down across from her and unrolled the map on the table without preamble. It was a large-scale print of Lorien Bay, marked up in pencil — potential project locations circled, routes between them sketched in, notes in small neat handwriting in the margins.

"Six locations," he said, by way of greeting. "The brief specifies we choose from the provided list, but I think there's a case for proposing a seventh if we find something that fits the theme better. Vasquez said there's flexibility."

Mira looked at the map. She'd seen versions of this before — had lived with versions of this, on the wall of their apartment, for three years — but this one was his alone, unmarked by her input, the handwriting slightly less certain than it would become.

"What's the theme?" she asked, which she knew from the brief but wanted to hear him articulate.

"Connection," he said, without hesitation. "The brief says 'relationship between designed spaces and human behavior,' which is academic language for: how does a place make people feel connected to each other and to the city, and what happens when it fails at that."

She looked up from the map. He was watching her, waiting to see if she'd push back or agree or offer something else.

"And when it fails?" she said.

"That's where it gets interesting. A space that was designed to create connection but doesn't — a plaza that's always empty, a path no one uses, a bridge that —" He stopped.

Mira waited.

He frowned slightly, like he'd lost the thread of his own sentence. "A bridge that feels wrong despite looking right," he finished. "There are a few of those in any city. Places the design logic said should work but don't."

She made a note in her notebook. Her handwriting was steady. "What makes them feel wrong?"

"Could be a lot of things. Scale. Sight lines. The relationship between the structure and the water underneath, if it's a crossing. The way light hits at certain times." He paused again, tapping the end of his pencil against the table in the rhythm she recognized as thinking. "Sometimes it's the history of a place. A space can carry a feeling that isn't in the design — something that happened there, or something people associate with it. You can't engineer that out. It just accumulates."

Mira looked at her notebook.

On it, she'd written: *a bridge that feels wrong despite looking right.*

She crossed it out and wrote: *history of a place — feelings that accumulate, can't be engineered out.*

"Okay," she said. "Six locations. Let me see the list."

They worked for two hours. He had a systematic approach to location scouting — variables he checked for, questions he asked about sight lines and foot traffic and the temporal quality of a space, how it changed between morning and evening, between weekday and weekend. She had her own approach, which was more instinctive and more image-driven, and they were different enough to create friction in a useful way.

By the end of the meeting they'd narrowed the six to four preferred choices and had a reasonable argument about a fifth, which he thought was too architecturally obvious and she thought had exactly the kind of overlooked quality the project was built for.

"The point isn't to find the most interesting space," he said. "It's to find the most revealing one."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

"They are if interesting means visually striking. A visually striking space already has people paying attention to it. You're not revealing anything — you're confirming what people already see."

"Interesting doesn't mean visually striking," she said. "I mean interesting the way you used the word about the bridge feeling wrong. That's not visually striking. That's something else."

He looked at her. A pause that was slightly longer than the conversation required.

"Fair," he said.

She wrote the fifth location back on the list.

They packed up their things. He rolled the map back up with the same neat efficiency she remembered, making it look like something he'd done a thousand times. She put her annotated brief in her bag and told herself that two hours of productive collaboration was exactly what this was and nothing more.

"Same time next week?" he said.

"Same time next week," she confirmed.

At the door, he paused. "Can I ask you something?"

She made herself look up. "Sure."

"The right-angle thing. You said it was about not getting things for free." He had his jacket half on, which gave him the appearance of someone who'd thought of the question on his way out and hadn't been planning to ask it. "Is that a philosophy you apply generally, or just to photography?"

Mira held his gaze for a count of three.

"I'll let you know," she said, "when I figure it out."

He smiled — that brief slightly-crooked smile — and finished putting on his jacket, and walked out.

Mira stood in the library entrance for a moment, surrounded by the smell of old paper and floor wax and the particular institutional quiet of a Friday afternoon, and thought: *Do not be personally revealing.*

She thought: *That was personally revealing.*

She thought: *Seven months.*

The October light was doing something beautiful to the glass windows overhead, fragmenting into small bright shapes across the floor. She looked at it for a moment. Then she walked out into the afternoon and told herself, very firmly, that she was doing fine.

The weekend arrived with the particular quality of October weekends in Lorien Bay — the sky going dramatic, clouds moving fast off the lake, the temperature dropping to the point where people started wearing coats they'd been avoiding for weeks. Mira spent Saturday in the darkroom and Sunday doing the theory reading she'd been putting off, and on both days she thought about the project with a focused professionalism that she was not going to classify as anything other than what it was.

On Sunday evening, Celia came home from a textile workshop with fabric samples and strong opinions about the color theory of the professor who'd run it, and they ate dinner together at the small table in their room and talked about things that had nothing to do with Noel Ashbourne, which was both a relief and, in some complicated way, its own kind of longing.

The rules, Mira thought. She was following the rules. Revised rules, but rules. She was being careful.

She was being careful and she was thinking about him constantly, which was maybe not what the rules were supposed to produce but was at least honest.

---

On Monday morning she went to the photography building early and developed the roll she'd shot over the weekend. Mostly architectural details — she'd been working on learning the visual language of the city again, from the beginning, trying to see it the way she'd seen it at nineteen and not through the accumulated lens of everything that had happened since. It was harder than she'd expected. The city kept insisting on meaning things.

The last three frames of the roll were from Sunday afternoon, when she'd gone for a walk to think and had ended up, almost without deciding to, in the neighborhood near the water where the old residential streets gave way to the commercial district. She'd photographed a wall there — a plastered wall with old paint in layers, the newest coat pale blue, the older ones showing through in places, grey and green and what might have been white originally but had gone the color of old bone.

Layer photography was something she'd done a lot of in the years after. Searching for what showed through. Trying to find the older image beneath the current one.

She looked at the three frames under the darkroom light.

In the middle frame, in the left third of the image, at the edge of the wall where it met a doorway, someone had written something in chalk. She hadn't noticed it when she'd taken the photograph. She'd been looking at the paint layers, not the margins.

She brought the print closer to the light.

The chalk writing said: *What's under the blue?*

It was probably nothing. Someone's note to a friend, or a piece of public art, or a question left on a wall by someone having a philosophical moment. Lorien Bay had a culture of that sort of thing — the city had more public writing per capita than anywhere else she'd lived, little messages and questions and declarations tucked into the corners of walls and bus shelters and the undersides of bridges.

The undersides of bridges.

She pinned the print to the drying line and stood looking at it.

Here was the thing about Memory Echo — about the phenomenon that Mira didn't yet have a name for, hadn't yet met Professor Thorne, hadn't yet been given any framework for understanding why her film kept showing her things she hadn't photographed. She didn't know it was a phenomenon. She just knew that her camera was doing something she couldn't explain, and that the unexplainable things seemed to be gesturing consistently toward the same location.

The bridge.

Always the bridge.

She thought about the first photograph — Noel on Morrow Bridge in the rain, an image she hadn't taken. She thought about the figure in the background of the lake shot. She thought about the map in her bag that had appeared already folded, already used.

She thought about what Noel had said, sitting across from her in the library: *a space can carry a feeling. Something that happened there. It just accumulates.*

She was a photographer. She was supposed to follow what the images were telling her.

She did not go to Morrow Bridge on Monday. She didn't go on Tuesday either. But she took the long route home on Wednesday, the one that skirted the edge of the waterfront district, and she stood at the end of the street that ran perpendicular to the bridge approach and looked at the structure from a distance — the clean lines of it, the glass railings catching the late afternoon light, the two lanes of automated traffic moving across it in their usual quiet patterns.

From this distance it looked like what it was: a well-designed piece of infrastructure in a well-designed city. Functional, elegant, the kind of thing that ended up in architecture journals.

She raised her camera and took one frame.

Then she put the camera down and walked home the short way, and that evening she developed the film and found, in the frame she'd taken, that the bridge was clear and sharp and empty and entirely itself.

No ghosted image. No figure that shouldn't be there. Nothing she hadn't put there herself.

She looked at the clean, accurate image of Morrow Bridge in the afternoon light and felt, absurdly, almost disappointed.

She pinned it to the line beside the wall photograph and stood looking at them both for a while — the question in the chalk, the bridge that wouldn't tell her anything yet.

*What's under the blue?*

She was going to find out. That was, in the end, why she was here. Not just to keep him alive — to understand what had taken him, and whether it could be changed. To follow the images wherever they led, even toward the things she didn't want to see.

She just needed to be careful about the order in which she looked.

She added a note to her notebook, separate from the rules page: *The images are pointing somewhere. Follow them carefully. Do not follow them recklessly.*

Below that: *There is a difference between being careful and being afraid, and you need to be clear with yourself about which one you're doing at any given moment.*

She read that back and wasn't sure if it was wisdom or rationalization. The gap between those two things seemed to be getting narrower the longer she was here.

In the morning she would meet with her theory seminar group, and in the afternoon she had time blocked for independent studio work, and in the evening there was a screening at the arts center she'd been meaning to attend. A full day with no particular proximity to Noel Ashbourne, no reason to walk past the Urban Design building, no occasion on which the rules would be tested.

She was looking forward to it with a relief that was itself, she noticed, a kind of information about where she currently stood.

The chalk question on the wall waited in its photograph, patient as all questions that no one has answered yet. *What's under the blue?*

She turned off the darkroom light and went home through the evening city, past the tram stops and the lit café windows and the silver birches that lined the east path, and she did not look toward the bridge, and the bridge did not insist.

Not tonight. Tonight she was simply a nineteen-year-old student walking home across a beautiful campus in October, doing her best.

It was enough.

It had to be enough, for now.

The next morning she revised the rules again. Not adding new ones, just reading the existing ones more carefully, the way you read a contract when you're starting to suspect the terms may not have covered everything.

Rule one: No Blue Finch Café. Still holding. Rule two: No Morrow Bridge unless required by the project. She'd stood at the end of the approach street and taken one photograph and walked home, and the world had not ended. She was going to count that as holding, with modifications. Rule three: Keep the collaboration professional. The library meeting had been professional. Mostly. The last exchange had been slightly less professional, which was something she was going to note and not repeat. Rule four: Do not be personally revealing.

She stared at rule four for a long time.

*I'll let you know when I figure it out,* she'd said, and he'd smiled that crooked smile and walked out, and she'd stood in the library entrance thinking about whether she'd just broken the most important rule on the list.

The answer was probably yes. The answer was probably that rule four was going to be the hardest one to keep, because the self she'd been at nineteen — the self she was now, again, on the outside — was a person who thought out loud and found her ideas by saying them, and the version of her that had learned to be careful and quiet had been made by grief, not by nature.

She was going to have to be careful about which version showed up to the project meetings.

She closed the notebook and got ready for the day, and tried to remember that careful was not the same as diminished, and that there was a version of herself that could work alongside him without either losing him again or making the same mistakes that had led to losing him in the first place.

She was going to find that version.

She was fairly confident it existed.