They looked at one another as if the answer was obvious. The woman with a silver braid said, "An onion has layers. So does guilt. So does love. We peel one, we peel one. We exchange."
There were two women and a young man. Their faces were familiar in a way she could not place: the ledger clerk Anders' handwriting had been neat, and the young man's jawline matched the angle in a photograph she had once seen of a missing friend's brother. They smiled like conspirators.
Days blurred. Sometimes she would find strange files on her desktop and sometimes a wav file would hum a direction like a compass. Each time she followed, she found the shop's doorway and, always, an exchange: a photograph given for a photograph stored. Some left griefs, some left guilt, some left the raw memory of a love that had become ash. Each photograph was a parcel of someone’s internal geography, tacked into the shop's private atlas.
