I was 14 when I found the photograph that changed two lives and, in a weird way, changed mine too.
I live in a small town where privacy is more of a joke than a real thing. We have one school, a few grocery stores, one church that somehow manages to host every funeral and every bake sale, and one library that smells like dust and old paper.
If your grandpa got into a fight in 1972, the lady at the post office still remembers who threw the first punch.
That afternoon, I went to the library because I did not want to go straight home.
My grandma and I lived together in a little white house just a few blocks from the church. My mom worked two towns over and got home late most days, and my grandma believed in knowing where I was at all times.
If I got home too early, she would put me to work peeling potatoes, carrying laundry, or listening to one of her friends talk about blood pressure medicine.
So I stopped at the library to kill an hour.