Camille's cracked second step

The picture was of Camille's building. Not mine. Not a stranger's. Camille's — the exact cracked second step she almost ate it on last year laughing at something I said and I caught her elbow and we both pretended I hadn't.

I knew it was her stoop before I finished looking. The railing. The green paint peeling wrong. The way the light hits it at dawn because the building across is white and bounces it back.

Then fourteen seconds later my sister's name in someone else's mouth.

I sat down with my hands flat on the wood. I did not pick the phone up for seven hours. Yesterday I wrote I was going back Monday because I did not want to be the woman who flinched. That is still true. What I did not write is that the flinching is not mine anymore. It is Camille's. They put her at the end of a photograph and now the choice about Monday is a choice about her too, and I did not sign up for that.

Jolene texted back different angle. Her building. So we are being watched from two different sides by the same people or by two different people about the same thing. I do not know which is worse. Jolene and I might be the same problem or two separate ones and the not-knowing is the part that makes my chest feel like a drawer someone keeps opening.