Ульяна Солнечная – Its Never Too Late - As Long As Youre Alive (страница 8)
Its fan whirred loudly, and it took forever to load.
But the internet worked.
“What’s his name?” Barbara asked briskly.
“Jacob Sullivan.”
“City?”
“The last I heard, he moved to New York. To become a photographer.”
Barbara’s fingers began tapping at the keys.
Kate stared at the screen and felt her heart pounding somewhere in her throat.
“Oh,” Barbara said after a moment. “There are a lot of Jacob Sullivans. But if he’s a photographer… look.”
A website appeared on the screen.
A photo gallery.
Black-and-white photographs —
New York streets,
portraits of old men,
children playing in puddles,
a woman in a wide-brimmed hat standing against the ocean.
And there, at the top:
Jacob Sullivan
“Is it him?” Barbara asked.
Kate stared at the photographs.
Not at a face — there was no face yet.
At the style.
At the way the light fell across people.
At the composition.
“It’s him,” she whispered. “That’s how he always saw things. Differently.”
Barbara clicked farther.
They found an About page.
And there, finally, was a photograph.
A man with a mane of silver hair, deep lines around his eyes, but the same ironic, slightly sideways gaze.
He was holding an old film camera.
Kate stared and could not look away.
Fifty years.
Fifty years had passed.
And yet the look in his eyes was the same.
As if time had stopped only there.
“Handsome,” Barbara said approvingly. “In a distinguished sort of way. So… what now?”
Kate was silent.
What now?
She did not know.
“You could write to him,” Barbara said gently. “There’s a contact button. Right there.”
She pointed to the screen.
“I don’t know why I would,” Kate said honestly. “I don’t want to change anything. I don’t want to wreck a family if he has one. I just…”
She fell quiet, searching for the words.
“You want him to know?” Barbara offered softly.
“You want that girl you used to be to finally say what she never said back then?”
Kate looked at her.
Barbara nodded, understanding without making a fuss of it.
“Write,” she said. “I’ll go put the kettle on. I won’t breathe down your neck.”
She left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
Cherry the cat stayed, though — jumping into Kate’s lap and purring as if warmth itself were a duty.
Kate sat there for a long time, staring at the empty message box.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
She had barely typed since school.
After that, life had been phone calls.
And after Tom died, there had only been the flip phone Cheryl bought her “for emergencies.”
But once, years ago, her granddaughter had shown her how to type.
One finger.
Slowly.
Kate began:
Jacob, hello.
You’ll probably be surprised. This is Kate Morgan. We were in school together. I used to let you copy my algebra homework, and you used to lend me Hemingway. Do you remember?
She stopped.
What nonsense.
Fifty years had passed, and here she was talking about algebra.
She deleted it all.