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opener?”
    He was right, and a little door swung out from the closet wall as soon as he stuck in the key. It was a safe, about one and a half by one and a half feet.
    Abe looked at me, and I shrugged. I’d had no idea it was there, and wondered if Howie had added it during his years in the apartment or if it had been built in originally. Right now, all that was in it was a flat, square box, which Abe carefully lifted out. He carried it over to the bed and we sat on the mattress. I moved a pile of clean, folded sheets to make room.
    Inside the box was a stack of photographs. Not exactly what I’d expected in a wall safe, even if it was a flimsy hiding place. Abe tipped the box onto the bed, and out spilled a collage of color photos and black-and-whites, wallet-sized rectangles, and eight by tens that looked like they had at one time been in frames.
    My throat tightened as I began to recognize faces in the pictures. My dad. My mom. Howie, of course. Dogs several generations before Queenie, and lots of the Granger clan, including Abe. From what I could see, the photos ranged in time from my birthday party last month all the way back to the year I was two, when Howie first joined our family. When both of my folks were still alive.
    I could feel Abe’s gaze on the side of my face. “Want some company while you look through these?”
    I fluttered my fingers over the photos. Dr. Peterson had stressed the need to share my grief, and who better to do that with than Abe? No matter what the state of our romance, he’d been my best friend for almost twenty years, and that hadn’t changed.
    I stared at the bedspread, afraid to meet Abe’s eyes for fear I might do something embarrassing, like cry. “Do you mind?”
    He picked up a photo. “I’d love to.”
    We sat quietly for a few minutes, shuffling through the pictures, occasionally sharing a particularly special one. Abe finally spoke.
    “I know I was a little pushy about your bike today. I’m sorry I can’t feel more positive about it.”
    “Me too. I know you hate it.”
    “It’s not the bike itself. It’s just…I worry about you. There was another article in the paper today. Some poor guy—can you believe his nickname was The Skull?—got killed on his way home from work. Truck pulled out right in front of him. He was thrown a hundred feet. Happened right there in Souderton, at the intersection of Old 309 and 113.”
    My head snapped toward him. “Yesterday?”
    “Yeah. In the afternoon.”
    “Oh my God. I drove by it.”
    “The accident?”
    “The aftermath. The bike must’ve been hidden behind the truck. I didn’t even see it.”
    He looked at me for a moment before picking up another picture. “That’s why I wish you’d stop riding. Because bikers get killed. Not because I want to take something away from you.”
    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Guilt crashed into me. Guilt for worrying Abe. Guilt that I hadn’t known a fellow biker had died just feet from where I’d driven.
    “So now you know how I feel,” Abe said. “I’ll try to keep my mouth shut about it from now on.”
    I nodded, not sure what to say. I was glad he cared about me, but burdened by his anxiety.
    “So which dog was this?” Abe asked. “Any relation to Queenie?”
    I shook myself out of my thoughts and looked at the picture he was holding of my very first dog—not actually an ancestor of Queenie, although Ringo had been a collie, too.
    Life had thrust me into a horrible place during the past few weeks, but now I was here, with my best friend, looking at things that meant a great deal to me. I made myself as comfortable as I could on the bed, and let myself drift into Howie’s compilation of his, and therefore my, history.

Chapter Five
    “You ready for me?”
    I pulled my head out from under the open hood of my truck to see Lucy standing in the doorway of the tractor barn. I leaned in the truck’s window and turned down Stevie Ray Vaughan, right in the middle of