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Was my son in one? I don’t remember that.”
    In a department store, I thought, feeling bereft. Now I remembered a woman I’d taken home about five years ago. Halfway though the evening I’d realized she looked a little like the woman in the photograph, but she had turned to face me and the illusion was broken. Her name was Irma, and she had worked in a department store, I thought, amazed that I could remember so much. She’d left in the middle of the night because she’d been worried about her dog. I never called her back.
    â€œYou mean I’ve been waiting—” I said. “Waiting ten years for a woman, and all this time—”
    Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry if—”
    â€œSorry,” I said numbly. “Somehow that doesn’t seem to cover wasting ten years of my life. I guess you got your revenge after all.”
    â€œI wasn’t out for revenge,” she said. “I wanted to show you something. To show you that life isn’t as much fun when you know what’s going to happen. To make you loosen up a bit.”
    â€œYeah, well, you did just the opposite,” I said, turning away.
    â€œRobert?” she said, tentatively. I didn’t look back.
    When I got home I took the photographs out and spread them across my desk. I was surprised to see how worn they were, how frayed at the edges. How many hours had I spent looking at them, planning a future that never existed? I lit a match and held it up to one photograph, then threw them in the fireplace. Five seconds later they had all burned.
    Now, in the evenings, mostly I sit and think. I feel lost, as though I’ve survived a great tragedy. I neglect my work, and my answering service has one or two messages every day from irate clients. I think about my wasted ten years, about Cassie and her crazy family, and their strange ability to charm. I think that sooner or later it will be time to call Cassie back, to start a life that was stopped—that I stopped—ten years ago. I’m pretty sure Cassie will turn me down. But for the first time in a long time, I don’t know for sure . And that excites me.

A FTERWORD
    Sometimes two separate story ideas combine to make one story. The idea of photographs that show the future had come to me about three or four years before I’d started this story; I’d tried writing it then but it hadn’t worked out. And I knew a few reptile smugglers and thought that they might be interesting to write about. It was only when I tried putting these two things together, when I came up with the character of Aurora the reptile fanatic, that the story started to work.

E VER A FTER
    The wedding ceremony had been very tiring. Of course they’d rehearsed it—rehearsed it over and over until she thought she’d fall asleep during the actual ceremony—but they had never gone through it while she was wearing the wedding gown. The gown had been made in a hurry, and made wrong: the bodice pinched so tightly she thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
    The gown. The princess felt a wave of embarrassment thinking about it, glad that the inside of the coach was so dark that he couldn’t see her blush. Of course she couldn’t afford a wedding gown, she had known that, and she had expected that something had been arranged. But when she’d found out that it hadn’t been, she’d had to go to the prince and haltingly, stuttering on almost every word, explain her problem. And the prince had had to go to his father, the king, and the king (who was very kind, everyone had said so) had laughed and said, Well of course, buy her a gown. Only make it green, to match her eyes.
    It had been a joke, she knew that. Only when the king made a joke everybody took it as an order, because they were never sure when it wasn’t going to be a joke. And her eyes were blue, not green, but the