The Wristband

That left the paper.

Her father had scanned some of the old prints, but only some, and Lucie knew exactly where the rest were: in the garage at Trélazé, in three shoeboxes and a fibreboard suitcase that had belonged to her grandmother.

She went on the Saturday. Her mother was at her aqua-aerobics class until midday, which suited her and which she did not care to explain to herself.

The garage smelled of cold concrete and mower fuel. She set up the portable scanner on the workbench, plugged in an extension lead, and began.

There were four hundred and thirty prints.

She counted them first, before scanning anything, and wrote the number on the first page of her notebook. It was a reflex: you do not begin a deposit without knowing how many items it contains, or you will never know whether any are missing.

She worked in the order they came, without sorting, because an order — even a bad one — is information and you never destroy it before recording it. The three boxes covered 1989 to 2003, loose. The suitcase held what came before: her father as a child, her grandmother as a young woman, people she did not know, military service, a wedding from 1958.

She found two new occurrences in the boxes and noted them. Then she opened the suitcase.

At the bottom, under a folder of passport photographs and a bundle of postcards, there was a kraft envelope, thirteen by eighteen, soft, worn at the corners.

It contained a single photograph.

Lucie took it out and turned it into the light of the inspection lamp.

It was a colour print of a hospital room. Tight framing, direct flash, the colours gone pink as in every print of that period.

A young woman was sitting up in bed against two pillows. Her dark hair was stuck to her forehead; she had an exhausted, happy face, and she was holding against her a newborn wrapped in a white blanket.

Lucie looked at the woman's face.

She fetched, from her bag, one of her survey prints — number three, the 1996 school fête, enlarged to a hundred per cent.

She laid the two side by side on the workbench.

It was the same woman, eight years younger.

She stood a long while in the garage.

She looked honestly for every other explanation, in order, the way you eliminate hypotheses on a record card.

A sister. A cousin. A family resemblance — the commonest and the most misleading: in a family collection you think you recognise someone you have never met three times an album.

Except that she had had this woman in front of her on twenty-six prints spread out for three weeks, measured, dated, tabulated. And the hospital print was not a background shot: it was a portrait, from a metre and a half, with flash, with a whole sharp face.

Then she picked the photograph up again and brought it close to the lamp, because there was something at the baby's wrist.

A maternity wristband. A strip of white plastic, crimped shut, with a label.

She moved closer. The label was at an angle, half in the shadow of the blanket, but the writing was clear: capitals in felt-tip, the kind midwives wrote in the delivery room.

She read it.

LUCIE.

She laid the photograph flat on the workbench.

Her first thought was professional, and she clung to it like a handrail: you do not draw conclusions from a print, you date it first.

She turned the photograph over.

On the back, top right, in pencil, there was an inscription.

19-01-88

She knew that handwriting better than her own. She had seen it on notes in her schoolbag, on jam labels, on thirty years of birthday cards, in the car's service book. It was her father's hand, with the closed 9 and the 8 made of two circles.

She took out her phone and did what she would have done for any document deposited at the service: she photographed the front, the back, the envelope, and noted the time.

Then she sat down on the step of the workbench, with the print on her knees.

She had been born on the third of April 1994, at the maternity hospital in Angers, at twenty past five in the morning, three kilos two hundred. She had seen the birth certificate four times in her life, the last to renew her passport.

She was holding in her hands a photograph dated by her father the nineteenth of January 1988, in which an unknown woman held a newborn whose maternity wristband carried her own first name.

Six years before she was born.

She heard her mother's car pull into the drive, and did something she was ashamed of for weeks afterwards: she slid the photograph into her bag, closed the suitcase, and unplugged the scanner.

Chantal Aveline came into the garage with her swimming bag.

— Have you been here long?

— Two hours. I've finished the boxes.

— Did you find what you were looking for?

Lucie wound the extension lead round her elbow, slowly, clockwise, because she needed to do something with her hands.

— Maman, did Dad have somebody before you?

Her mother set down her bag.

— Why are you asking me that?

— No reason.

— You don't ask that for no reason.

— Did he have somebody before you?

Chantal picked up her bag again and headed for the kitchen door.

— Everybody has had somebody before, she said. Come and eat.

Lucie drove back to Angers at two o'clock and put the photograph on her table.

She sat in front of it, without opening it in any software, without scanning it, without measuring anything, which never happened to her.

I was born on the third of April 1994, she thought.

This photograph is six years older than I am, and it carries my name.