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smile genuine, her eyes shining with hope for the future.
    “Save me,” Abby muttered, yanking the picture from its encasement and tossing it into the fire. As she slowly sipped wine from her cup, her thumb ached, its throbbing measuring out her heartbeats. She watched the edges of the paper bake and turn brown before curling and snapping into flame. The smiling, happy couple was quickly consumed by fire, literally going up in smoke. “Until death do us part,” she mocked. “Yeah, right.”
    She glanced down at the album again. The next picture was of the family. A group shot. She with her father and sister; he with both proud parents and his two, shorter, not-as-successful, nor-as-handsome, brothers, Adam and Lex. His sister, Anna, and her husband were also in the picture.
    “No time for nostalgia,” she said as Ansel trotted into the room and hopped onto the sofa. She tossed the picture onto the logs. Eager flames found the new dry fuel and the page quickly curled and burned.
    Another sip of wine and the next picture, this one of Luke alone, standing tall and proud in his black tuxedo. He was good-looking; she’d give him that. Frowning, she realized she’d loved him once, but it seemed a lifetime ago. He’d been a newscaster in Seattle, his popularity on the rise. He’d come into her little studio for a new head shot.
    The attraction had been immediate. He’d joked and she’d been irreverent, not impressed that he was somewhat of a local celebrity. It had been her feigned disinterest that had intrigued him.
    Only later, six months after their initial meeting, after he’d proposed and she’d accepted, did she learn the reason he’d shown up at her photography studio. He’d gotten her name from a coworker, an assistant producer, her sister, Zoey. No one had mentioned that they’d been lovers. Oh no. That had slipped out later, nearly a month after the nuptials—the nuptials where Zoey had caught Abby’s bouquet. Abby had first learned of their affair in the bedroom no less, when Luke had uttered the wrong name. Though both Luke and Zoey had sworn the affair was over long before the wedding, Abby had never trusted either of them about that particular bit of shared history.
    “Isn’t that just perfect,” she said now to Ansel. He climbed onto the back of the little couch and settled onto the afghan her grandmother had made. Yawning, he showed his thin teeth, and Abby quickly stripped the rest of the photographs from their jackets. One by one, she tossed the pictures into the fire, watched them curl, smoke, and burn.
    “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she muttered as the fire began to die. Finishing her wine, she silently vowed that tonight her life was going to change forever.
    Little did she know how right-on her words would be.
     
    He slipped between the boards of the broken fence and stared up at the edifice where it had all happened so long ago. A surge of power sizzled through his bloodstream as he stepped through the overgrown bushes. Moist spiderwebs pressed against his face. He inhaled the humid, dank scent of earth and decay.
    Insects thrummed and chirped, causing the night to feel alive. The wan light from a descending moon washed over the landscape of broken bricks, dry, chipped fountains, and overgrown lawns.
    Where once there had been lush, clipped hedges and clear ponds covered with water lilies, there now was only ruin and disrepair. The ornate red brick building with its gargoyles on the downspouts and windows was now crumbling and dark, a desiccated skeleton of a once great lady.
    He closed his eyes for a second, remembering the sights and smells of the hospital with its grand facade and filthy, wicked secrets. Prayers had been whispered, screams stifled, a place where God and Satan met.
    Home.
    Opening his eyes, he walked swiftly along a weed-choked path that was, no doubt, long forgotten.
    But not by him.
    Twenty years was a generation.
    Twenty years was a lifetime.
    Twenty years was