Page 69 of What Goes Around

I narrowed the year range.

Graduation: 1999.

There he was.

Brandon Richards. Finance major. Honors List.

It was proof that he had once lived fully, before he turned into the man who sat across from me at dinner, empty behind the eyes and absent in every way that mattered.

Next, I searched for her.

“Brandon Richards + Ines + UC Berkeley.”

Nothing.

I widened the search.

“Ines + University of California Berkeley + 2000.”

“Ines + UC Berkeley.”

“Ines + student + 2001.”

The internet gave me garbage and ghosts, old forum posts, dead links, empty alumni pages filled with smiling strangers who were not her.

So I changed tactics. Local history. I typed in: Berkeley newspaper archive.

The screen loaded into decades of scanned issues, headlines, classifieds, announcements, blurry photographs. I clicked into a digitized archive called The Berkeley Chronicle.

The site took an eternity to load. A digital graveyard of newsprint and lives.

I started at the year they graduated.

1999.

Then 2000.

Birth announcements. Engagement notices. School concerts. Weddings.

And then something caught my eye.

My breath hitched.

ENGAGEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT — JULY 2000

Brandon Richards and Ines Laurent

The families of Brandon Richards and Ines Laurent are pleased to announce the engagement of their children...

The screen blurred.

Them. Together. Engaged.

Her face, young and radiant, the same smile from the photograph in his office. His arm wrapped around her waist, possessive, familiar.

The caption beneath read:

The couple met while studying in Berkeley and plan to wed later this year.