Faces scratched.
Names crossed through with a heavy black marker.
“Some families do this,” he said. “Usually after divorces. Sometimes worse.”
He left the room.
I sat in the lab for 4 hours with a magnifier and a UV light.
The intentional damage was crude.
Underneath the marker, with the right light, I could still read the names.
With chemistry, I could lift the scratches off the gelatin.
I brought the album back.
When I handed it to the family, a woman in her 40s, who’d been the scratched-out face, sat down on the lab floor and cried with her hand on the laminate.
I knew then what I had been chosen by.
I graduated in the spring of 2018.
Telare hired me three weeks later.
I rented a one-bedroom apartment in Starland District, 4 miles from my parents’ house on Bull Street and approximately 4 million miles from their dinner table.
I did not stop seeing them.
Christmas dinner.
Easter brunch.
My grandmother’s birthday, which my mother had begun to call an unhappy day for our family so that we no longer marked it.
I went to those things.
I sat through them.
I left when I could.
I did not eat seconds.
My sister Caroline started Mercer Law in 2022.
My mother called me to brag.
“Petra, can you believe top quartortile her first semester? She has the real family brain, you know.”
“That’s wonderful, Mom.”
“Of course, you have your own special little talents.”
“Yes, Mom.”
When my work was profiled in the Savannah Morning News a year later, a piece about a project I’d led restoring a Reconstruction-era album collection for the Telfare, my mother called and laughed for the first time in months.
“How funny,” she said. “You spend your whole life saving other people’s pictures.”
I held the phone.
“My funny little Petra,” she said. “Rescuing strangers’ memories.”
She actually wished me a good week.
She said it the way you wish the postman a good week.
Then she hung up.
I sat on the floor of my apartment.
I did not cry.
I noticed that I did not cry.
I noticed that I had not cried in front of her or about her since the year I was 12, when I had stood at the curb in the rain and watched the sanitation truck eat my grandmother’s house.
If you’ve ever felt erased by the people who were supposed to keep you, drop a single word in the comments below.
Mine was invisible.
I want to hear yours.
And if you’re someone who has done your own restoration work on yourself, quietly, without anyone clapping, type the word restored.
I see you.
I went on with my work.
I met Theo a few months later at a museum fundraiser in March 2023.
He bid on a 1920s plate camera and lost it to a dentist from Hilton Head, and we ended up at the same dessert table making fun of the dentist’s tie.
I am not the woman who makes fun of dentists’ ties at fundraisers.
He was.
He found my serious face and made me laugh on purpose.
We were engaged by the end of that year.
The first time he came to Sunday dinner at my parents’ house, my mother took out the leather albums to show him our family.
She walked him through page one: Caroline in the hospital nursery.
Page two: Caroline at the lighthouse.
Page three: Caroline learning to walk.
Caroline.
Caroline.
Caroline.
On the drive home, Theo, who never asks intrusive questions, asked his only intrusive question.
“Petra, where are you in those books?”
I looked at the live oak scrolling by along Victory Drive.
I said, “I’m not.”
Theo’s hands tightened on the wheel.
He did not say anything for the rest of the drive.
He did not need to.
He had seen what he had seen, and he was a man who took notes.
Chapter 5: Finding the hidden box
Three weeks later, on a Saturday morning, when my parents were at brunch, Theo and I drove out to a little inland town called Bluton, South Carolina, where my grandmother’s only surviving sister still lived.
My great-aunt Hattie was 70 years old that year.
She was thin and sharp-boned and very Southern and very tired.
I had not seen her since I was 11.
She opened her door.
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she said, “Margaret told me you’d come. Took you long enough, child. Come in.”
Aunt Hattie’s house in Bluffton was a small white clapboard with a porch swing that did not swing anymore.
She kept hydrangeas in the yard.
The screen door slapped behind us.
Theo waited on the porch with two mugs of tea because Aunt Hattie said, “Honey, you’re a good man, but the things I need to show this girl don’t need a man’s eyes the first time.”
She took me into the back room of the house, the one that used to be a sewing room.
There were six photo albums on a shelf.
Not leather.
Cardboard.
Plain.
There was also a wooden box on the floor, pine, about the size of a cake box.
It had a brass keyhole and a key tied to the handle with a piece of green ribbon I recognized from the wreath my grandmother had hung on her porch every Christmas.
“I’ve been keeping this for you since 2004,” Aunt Hattie said. “Your grandmother brought it to me herself. Drove herself down here in the Buick.”
She said, “Hattie, Beatatrice is going to start emptying my house the minute I’m in the ground. She’s already started on Petra, so I’m going to start back at her.”