Nora Béraud

The Children of the Lake

There are four of them in the photograph. They all remember a fifth. Sorting through old summer-camp slides, Maud Lenoir rediscovers the summer of 1996: the windbreakers, the games, the lake. And an absence that makes no sense. She is not the only one who remembers this child. Other adults carry the same missing piece, with details they thought belonged only to them.