CHAPTER ELEVEN
The magazine had been read so many times that the spine had cracked, the pages soft and pliant as old cloth.
He sat at his kitchen table in the gray morning light, a cup of coffee cooling beside him, and turned to page forty-seven.
He didn't need to look at the page number anymore—his fingers knew the exact weight and texture of the pages that came before, could find this spot blindfolded, in the dark, in his sleep.
He'd done exactly that, more than once, waking at three in the morning with his hands already reaching for the nightstand where he kept the magazine when he wasn't carrying it with him.
I Love Duluth. The words curved across the cover in cheerful red script, promising stories about local businesses, notable residents, and the hidden gems that made this city worth celebrating.
The Winter edition. Months old now, the cover image of a snow-dusted lighthouse already feels like ancient history.
He turned to page forty-seven and looked at her.
She was smiling in the photograph—a professional headshot, probably taken for the magazine feature, her light blonde hair swept back from her face in soft waves.
The article was about up-and-coming entrepreneurs, local success stories, people building something meaningful in a city that the rest of the world forgot existed.
"Making Numbers Beautiful: How One Accountant Is Revolutionizing Small Business Finance. "
He didn't care about the article. He'd read it, of course—read it dozens of times, memorized every bland quote about passion and community and giving back—but the words were meaningless. Background noise. What mattered was her face.
Her smile.
The way the light caught her eyes in that photograph, making them seem warm and kind and alive in a way that hurt to look at.
She looked so much like her.
Not exactly. Never exactly. The hair was a slightly different shade, the nose a touch wider, the chin more pointed than rounded.
But when he squinted—when he let his vision blur just slightly, let the details soften into impression—she could almost be her.
It could almost be the woman he'd lost, the woman whose face he was beginning to forget, no matter how desperately he tried to hold onto it.
That was the cruelest part. Not the loss itself, but the slow erosion of memory that followed.
The way her features were fading in his mind was like a photograph left too long in the sun.
He could remember the idea of her face, the general shape and coloring, but the specifics—the exact curve of her smile, the precise shade of her eyes—those were slipping away, dissolving into something vague and terrible.
The magazine helped. The photographs helped.
They weren't hers. He knew that. He wasn't crazy, wasn't delusional, wasn't some monster who couldn't tell the difference between a stranger and the woman he'd loved. He knew exactly what he was doing, exactly who these women were, exactly what he was taking from them.
But when he closed their eyes and folded their hands and arranged them just so—when he stepped back and looked at them in the cold blue light of the freezer—for just a moment, just one perfect moment, he could pretend.
He could pretend she was still here.
He could pretend he wasn't alone.