The Woman Who Won My Honeymoon

How it begins

The woman who had taken Jo Neri's honeymoon brought a photo album.

That was the first unsettling thing. Nobody Jo knew printed holiday photographs anymore, especially not on thick cream paper with tissue between the pages.

The second unsettling thing was Jo herself, standing behind the woman in the first picture.

"I thought you should see these," Celia Navarro said.

They sat in a cafe above the harbor. Six weeks earlier, Jo had canceled the wedding, the flights, and the carefully negotiated magazine feature about traveling as a newly married couple. The hotel had refused a refund. Someone else had apparently enjoyed the room.

Jo touched the photograph without lifting it.

A terrace. Blue chairs. Celia beside a bowl of oranges. In the background, unmistakably, Jo wearing a coat she'd left at the dry cleaner that same week.

"This is edited."

"That's what I thought."

Celia turned the page.

A mountain train. A night market. A beach closed to visitors after a storm. Jo appeared in all three, never facing the camera, always close enough for the shape of her body to make recognition feel certain.

"That station was shut," Jo said.

"It wasn't when I was there."

Outside, a ferry sounded its horn. Jo watched a waiter carry two coffees toward a table and wished the world would stop being so comfortably ordinary around the album.

"Who booked the trip for you?"

Celia looked down at her hands.

"Your fiance."

Jo closed the album, then opened it again at the first image.

In the window behind the terrace, something reflected a different sky.

She leaned closer.

Whatever had happened on the honeymoon, someone had wanted her to believe the photographs before she asked whether the journey itself was possible.

For once, being paid to notice things might be useful.