It came with the first one in the September of 2023 and it is him at about sixteen, outdoors, squinting, with somebody's arm across his shoulders that has been cropped at the edge.
He has my father's chin. That is the first thing I thought and I thought it in about a second and a half, standing at the end of my own bed at twenty past eleven at night.
My father died in 2019. Isaac has never met him and never will and there is a chin walking round Brackenmere with it on.
And the thing I have had to sit with since is that the photograph was in that house for about four hours in 2023.
Freya took the first envelope off my kitchen table on the sixteenth of September with everything in it, including that, because I did not open it past the first page.
I had the photograph in my hand that night. I have remembered since. I looked at it for about four seconds and put it face down on the table and that is the point at which I said the sentence.
