Inez laid the album open to Isla Cobre and asked the question I'd been dreading since Julian's preview. "How do you know the sixth was the day you left this port? Not the itinerary. You."
I thought about it honestly, which took longer than I expected. "The ship's newsletter under our cabin door. It listed the departure time for that evening. I remember reading it while Owen showered."
"Good. That's yours. What about the seventh?"
The seventh was harder, because the seventh was the day everything afterward got written in other people's handwriting, not mine.
"We were sailing overnight toward Puerto Nacar," I said. "I went to bed around eleven. Owen said he wanted to stay up, watch the water, maybe get a drink at the lounge."
"Did you see him go to the lounge?"
"No. I saw him say he was going."
Inez let that sit without correcting it, which was its own kind of correction. I had told the story for so many years with Owen walking into that lounge that I'd stopped marking the difference between what he'd said and what I'd witnessed.
"What time did you wake up?"
"Around six. His bed hadn't been slept in. I went to find him before I let myself think anything was wrong."
"Where did you look?"
"The lounge first, because that's where he'd said he was headed. Then the pool deck, because he liked to watch the sunrise from there. Then I asked a crew member near the stairs if anyone had seen a man matching his description."
"What did the crew member say?"
"That he hadn't, but that he'd only come on shift an hour before." I heard how thin that sounded even as I said it, a single man's single hour standing in for a night none of us had actually watched.
"So the ship was approaching Puerto Nacar when you discovered he was gone. Not when he disappeared."
I opened my mouth to argue the distinction didn't matter, then closed it, because of course it did. I had spent twenty-seven years saying Owen disappeared the morning of April 7th as though I'd seen the moment happen, when what I actually had was an empty bed and a guess about when the emptiness began.
"I don't know when he disappeared," I said, and the sentence came out smaller than I meant it to, almost apologetic, as if admitting ignorance were itself a kind of failure toward him.
"That's not a weaker version of the story," Inez said. "It's the accurate one. You searched the places you went. You heard what the people you spoke to actually said. Everything past that edge is somebody else's memory, if it exists at all."
She pulled a blank sheet toward her and drew a line down the middle. On one side she wrote what I saw. On the other, what I was told. The inferred hour I'd carried for decades, the one I'd built whole press releases and search-fund letters around, went into neither column. She simply left it off.
I watched her remove it the way you'd watch someone take a splinter out, a small relief riding under a larger ache. "If we're going to compare anything to Julian's photograph," she said, "we start from exactly this chart. No more, no less."
I nodded, grateful and unsettled in equal measure, because for the first time in years my son's absence had a shape I could actually stand behind, instead of one I'd simply gotten used to repeating.