Celia found the market on a Saturday morning the way Celia found most things — by following a handwritten sign and her own instincts about where interesting things lived in a new city.

The market occupied a covered square two tram stops from campus, a rotating collection of vendors that appeared on weekends and dissolved again by Sunday evening. Furniture and textiles and old photographs and objects that had belonged to people who no longer needed them. Mira had been here before, in the other timeline, on a Sunday afternoon with Noel when they'd been looking for a lamp for the apartment they hadn't quite committed to sharing yet. He'd found a transit map from the 1960s and spent twenty minutes explaining to her why the original tram network had been better designed than the current one.

She missed that conversation with a specificity she wasn't prepared for.

"You're doing the math thing," Celia said, from two steps ahead, turning back to look at her.

"I'm not."

"You are. The face."

"I'm just looking at the market."

"You're looking at something that isn't the market." Celia waited for her to catch up. "You know you can tell me things, right? I'm aware we've known each other for three weeks, but I am very good at being told things and not making it weird."

Mira looked at her. In three weeks they had become, with a speed that surprised her, comfortable in the way that some people become comfortable quickly — not by suppressing the friction but by being willing to have it out loud. Celia said what she thought. She preferred it.

"I know," Mira said. "There's just not a version of this I can explain right now."

Celia considered this for a moment. "Okay," she said. "When there is, I'm here."

This was what she'd lost, the first time. Not just in the years after the accident — in the months before, when she'd been so consumed by Noel, by the project and the love and the slow building of a future, that she'd let the friendship compact itself into something smaller than it deserved to be. Celia had let it happen because she was generous, and Mira had let it happen because she'd been twenty-two and in love and certain that there was time for everything.

There was not always time for everything.

"I know," Mira said again, meaning it differently this time.

They moved through the market. Celia found a bolt of fabric in exactly the shade of blue she'd been looking for and spent ten minutes in a focused negotiation with the vendor that ended in mutual satisfaction. Mira found nothing she needed and several things she stopped to look at: a collection of old transit photographs, the network before it had been simplified; a box of developed negatives from an unknown photographer, each one a fragment of someone's documented life.

She bought three of the negatives. She didn't know why. They showed fragments of the city in a decade before she was born — a street corner she recognized, the lake path before the current pavement, the north face of the arts building under scaffolding that had been removed before she'd arrived.

The city, in other versions. The versions it had been before it became this.

She slid them into her bag and went to find Celia.

---

On the walk back, they passed a shop window that had a display of vintage posters — travel images mostly, the kind of saturated mid-century color that had become its own aesthetic category. One of them stopped Mira without her deciding to stop.

It was Lorien Bay, viewed from the eastern shore. The date, printed small in the corner, put it thirty years ago. The composition was straightforward: the bay, the skyline, the bridge.

Except it wasn't Morrow Bridge.

There was a different bridge in the photograph. An older structure, narrower, with stone supports rather than glass — a different generation of the crossing entirely. She could place the location: same span, same relationship to the two shores, but a bridge that had been replaced at some point with the current structure.

She knew Morrow Bridge had been built in the last decade. She knew, vaguely, that there had been an earlier crossing. She had not thought about what had happened to it, or when it had been replaced, or who had been involved in the decision to replace it.

She thought about those things now.

"You're doing it again," Celia said, appearing beside her.

"Looking at the poster."

"In that very specific way."

Mira took a photograph of the poster through the window. The shop was closed — they'd have to come back — but she wanted the image.

"What bridge is that?" she asked. "The old crossing."

Celia looked. "I don't know. I didn't know there was an old one." She squinted at the date. "Before our time. Maybe the records are in the city archive? Or the university library might have something — urban history, infrastructure, that kind of thing."

"The urban design program definitely has it," Mira said, and then heard herself say it and thought: I should not know that with such certainty. She added, more carefully: "I'd assume. It's the kind of thing they'd archive."

Celia accepted this. She accepted most things with an equanimity Mira was learning to appreciate.

They walked back to campus through the October streets, Celia talking about the blue fabric and what she was going to do with it, and Mira carried the three negatives in her bag and thought about the old bridge and the new bridge and the gap between them, and what it might mean that someone had decided, at some point, that the old one needed to be replaced.

---

That evening, sitting at her desk with the negatives spread out in front of her and a cup of tea cooling at her elbow, she heard a knock at the door that was not Celia's knock.

She knew Celia's knock. This was more deliberate, slightly apologetic — the knock of someone who wasn't sure of their welcome.

She opened the door.

Irene Ashbourne was shorter than Mira had expected, though she didn't know why she'd had any expectation. Sixteen and looking it, in a jacket two sizes too large that was probably Noel's. She had his eyes — the same grey-blue, set in a face that was still rounding out from childhood into whatever it would eventually become.

Mira had met Irene exactly once, in the other timeline. At the funeral. She had not been someone who wanted Mira's comfort.

"Hi," Irene said. "Are you Mira Everwyn? Photography program?"

"Yes."

"I'm Irene. Noel's sister. He asked me to give you this." She held out a small envelope. "He said he forgot to bring it to the last meeting but it's the schedule for the next three location visits."

Mira took the envelope. She was aware of something complicated moving through her — the specific dissonance of standing across from a person she had last seen grief-stricken and accusing, who was now simply a teenager on an errand, apparently perfectly uncomplicated.

"Thank you," she said.

Irene looked at her with a directness that was also familiar. "He talks about the project," she said. "The interdisciplinary one. More than he usually talks about school things."

Mira didn't say anything.

"He doesn't usually explain design stuff to me," Irene continued. "But last week he tried to explain about emotional resonance in spaces. I only understood about half of it." A pause. "He seemed to think you'd said something interesting about it."

"Professor Thorne said something interesting about it," Mira said carefully. "We were both in the lecture."

"Sure," Irene said, in the tone of someone who had drawn their own conclusion and was choosing not to share it. "Anyway. The schedule." She nodded at the envelope. "He said not to lose it because it's the only copy."

"I won't lose it."

Irene looked at her for one moment longer than was strictly necessary. Then she said "okay" and turned and walked back down the hall, hands in the pockets of the oversized jacket, and Mira stood in the doorway watching her go and feeling the strange double exposure of the moment — the version of Irene she remembered overlaid with the version of Irene who was currently walking away.

She went back inside and sat down and opened the envelope.

The schedule was handwritten, neat, with the same spatial quality to the handwriting she'd noticed in his notebook. Three dates, three locations, notes about what to photograph and what to analyze at each one. At the bottom, a line she hadn't expected: *If you want to look at the old bridge records, the UD archive is in the basement of the design hall. I can show you where it is.*

She read that line three times.

He didn't know what she was looking for. He couldn't. He'd offered the archive because the old bridge was a design history resource, because it was the kind of thing that came up naturally when you were thinking about the city's relationship to its own infrastructure.

Or possibly he'd offered it because he'd been thinking about what was under the blue and he was, as she'd noted on Wednesday, the kind of person who couldn't leave a design problem unexamined.

She wrote back a short reply — *Thursday works for the archive, thank you* — and sent it before she had time to revise the rules in any direction that would stop her from sending it.

The three negatives sat on her desk, fragments of the city before she knew it. The old bridge, the old shoreline, the old version of a crossing that had been replaced with something newer, something modern, something that had three camera units with newer mounting hardware on the eastern span.

Thursday. Thorne's office hours. Then the archive.

She was, she thought, doing a very poor job of the part of the plan that involved keeping her distance.

But she was doing an increasingly good job of following what needed to be followed, and perhaps those two things were going to have to coexist for a while, whether the rules liked it or not.

The theory seminar the following day covered a topic Mira had been circling for weeks without being able to name it directly: the ethics of the archive. Specifically, the question of what it meant to preserve, and who got to decide what was preserved, and the violence inherent in the decision of what to exclude.

The assigned text argued that every archive was also a selection — that the act of keeping was inseparable from the act of discarding, and that the discard pile was often where the most important evidence lived. The things that hadn't been preserved were usually the things that hadn't been convenient for the people doing the preserving.

Mira took careful notes.

She thought about maintenance records. About safety assessments. About the kind of documentation that would exist if a city's infrastructure had been signed off on by someone who knew about a flaw and had decided not to record it.

The discard pile. That was where you found the things that hadn't been convenient.

After the seminar, she sat in the library and drafted a list of what she was looking for — not the what of the investigation, which she knew, but the how. How to access maintenance records for a public bridge. How to find documentation of the safety assessment process. Whether there were public records that would contain the information she needed, or whether it was all buried in institutional archives that required credentials she didn't have.

She was a first-year photography student. She had no credentials. She had no institutional access beyond the standard university library. She had, as assets: a good eye for images, seven years of accumulated knowledge about the man who would eventually be the person most likely to find the evidence if she could point him in the right direction, and a willingness to follow photographs into places she didn't entirely want to go.

And Thursday. She had Thursday, with Thorne, who might know things she didn't.

And the archive, with Noel, who knew the design history of the city better than anyone she'd yet encountered.

She closed her notebook and went to the darkroom and developed the last roll from the market, and the negatives she'd bought came out clean and clear and showed her the city in its older versions, the streets and the paths and the crossing before the current bridge, everything prior to the version that had taken something from her.

*What's under the blue.*

She was going to find out.

Thursday was two days away. She had enough patience for two days. She had spent three years learning patience for something much larger than two days.

The negatives dried on the line. The city outside the darkroom window moved through its evening routines. Somewhere on campus, a girl in an oversized jacket was walking home from delivering a schedule to a woman she'd met for the first time and looked at once too long, filing away an impression she didn't yet have language for.

Mira stood in the red light and watched her photographs develop and thought about all the versions of things that existed at the same time, overlaid like layers of paint, each one present and each one slightly different.

The visible version and the version underneath.

She was getting closer to the underneath.

She could feel it.

She thought, before she turned off the darkroom light, about the look Irene had given her at the door. The one that lasted slightly too long and communicated something she didn't have a name for yet but that had the quality of recognition — the faint echo of a response to something Irene couldn't consciously remember but that her body had logged anyway.

In the other timeline, Irene had looked at her across a room full of people who were grieving and said: *You. You're why he's not here.*

She had been wrong about that — or partly wrong, which was maybe worse — but she had been looking at Mira with the specific attention of someone who had already decided what they were seeing.

This Irene had looked at her with something more uncertain. Something more open. As if she were trying to place a face she'd never seen but somehow already knew.

Memory Echo. The thing Thorne was going to explain on Thursday, that Mira didn't yet have language for. The thing that put impossible photographs in her film and lines on maps that led back to where they'd always been going.

If it could work through film and through maps and through the vague gravitational pull that kept her in the same room as the person she was trying to avoid — could it work through people, too? Could it have reached Irene, who had no direct connection to the bridge, no reason to feel anything about a woman she'd just met?

Or was Mira constructing patterns where there were none, the way people did when they needed there to be a structure to hold onto?

She didn't know. Thursday, maybe, she would know more.

She turned off the light and walked home in the dark, the city moving quietly around her, and she thought: two more days. I can be careful for two more days.

She had been careful every day so far.

Hadn't she.

The question had the quality of something she preferred not to answer directly, so she let it hang in the evening air and kept walking, and by the time she reached the dormitory she had decided to think about it in the morning, which was the decision she'd been making for three weeks and which had been, at least so far, sufficient to get her to the next day.

She was still here. He was still here. The bridge was still standing and she was still looking at it carefully, from the right angles, from the perspectives that didn't give you everything for free.

It was going to be enough.

It had to be.

Celia was asleep when she got back, the blue fabric folded neatly on the desk, the room warm and quiet. Mira sat on the edge of her bed for a while without turning on the lamp.

In the dark, she allowed herself one clear thought about Noel: that she was glad he'd sent the schedule. That the archive offer had been, regardless of what she was going to do with it, a version of him doing the thing he always did — seeing what needed to be looked at and offering to help look.

It was an extraordinarily ordinary quality to love in a person.

She missed it so precisely she couldn't locate where the missing happened — somewhere in the chest, somewhere below language, in the part of her that had spent three years carrying the shape of him like a weight she'd learned to walk with.

She lay down without undressing. The ceiling was white and clean and familiar now in the way things become familiar: through repetition, through the body accepting what the mind can't quite.

Two more days.

She was managing.