The ceilings were higher than he had expected. The rooms were clean, open, generous with space. Past the entrance, a kitchen to the right, a bathroom to the left, and beyond them the living area flowing into the bedroom. Heat was included. The floors were old parquet—scuffed in places—but Jacob decided that with some attention they could be brought back to a shine.

The furniture left behind surprised him. A sofa in supple, deep-toned leather. A dining table of solid, seasoned oak. Simple geometric-patterned curtains hung in every window. In the bedroom, a bed frame trimmed in brass. Any vintage shop in the neighborhood would price these well. Whoever had lived here had taste, and money, and then—suddenly—neither. Jacob could not imagine what emergency would drive a person to abandon things this fine.

Along the far wall stood a sturdy wooden dresser, five drawers deep, its old brass pulls gone green with verdigris. When he had finished stacking the cardboard boxes on top of it, he moved through the apartment room by room—checking shelves, opening cabinet doors, learning the actual shape of the space. He noted where the light came in. The larger bedroom had a classic black telephone on the nightstand. Two oversized double-hung windows faced the brick wall of the building next door, but on a clear day the light would bounce off that wall and cut diagonally deep into the room. The overhead wires would cast thin shadows. A little of the natural world—and it would feel, he thought, like something.

Then the storage. A student's habit: account for what might be useful. He pulled the dresser drawers from the top down.

Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty.

He pulled the fifth. It held fast. He braced himself and drew slowly—something was catching inside. He reached in and worked his wrist back and forth until his fingertips found paper. He eased it out: a discolored brown envelope, gone the color of old tea. He set it on the table.

Outside, a heavy truck passed, and the sound moved through him before he understood why he had gone still.

He recognized the feeling. It was the same hesitation he had known as a child, kneeling on the floor of his grandmother's closet, working the lid from a tin of biscuits. Though hesitation wasn't quite the right word. He wasn't uncertain about opening it. He was reluctant to give up the last moment before he knew—the final instant of not yet knowing. Jacob opened the envelope gently. Inside, wrapped in tracing paper, were four square photographs, old and formal.

He picked up the first, and his hands trembled before he understood why.

It was a studio portrait. At its center, a tall, elegant Black woman sat in a leather chair, holding a slight, bespectacled white man with a beard as one might hold a child. His head rested against her shoulder; his eyes were closed; his whole body had surrendered. She looked directly into the camera. She was not smiling, but her composure carried such quiet authority that Jacob felt he had walked into something that was not meant for him.

From their clothes, he dated the photograph to the 1930s. In New York then—rigidly, violently segregated—this image would have been more than unusual. Intimate. Unashamed. Formally composed. He could not look away from the man's face. Not peace, exactly. The expression of someone who has, for a moment, stopped fighting something. In the background: a dramatic arrangement of studio lights, the painted columns of a stock Greco-Roman backdrop.

The second photograph. The room was unmistakably Japanese—tatami matting, fusuma panels painted with classical floral motifs. Before them, a white man in formal Western dress sat in a wooden chair, legs crossed, shoes polished to a high shine. He had the bearing of a diplomat. But in a Japanese home, the minimum courtesy demanded upon entering any room—let alone one with tatami—was to remove one's shoes. Jacob's grandmother had taught him that. It was possible, he supposed, that the rule did not apply to foreigners—that certain guests were exempt. But the man's face showed no arrogance. Something stranger than arrogance: a composed, unapologetic, deliberate transgression. Jacob felt the photograph somewhere near his skin, in a way he couldn't quite put into words. But somewhere in his gut he understood what it meant: only someone who knows the rules understands what it means to break them.

The third was a rooftop, somewhere in Manhattan. Three men stood at the edge, looking down at the street far below. The people on the ground were too distant to make out. One of the three wore a hat; another had turned his coat collar up against the wind; the third had his back to the camera, looking out at something beyond the frame. There was something in the way he stood—waiting, or having just made a decision he could not walk back. There is a particular expression that crosses a person's face in the passage from one place to another, when they are suspended between. The back of the third man, distant as he was, was that.

The fourth. A bearded, brown-skinned man in a turban—a Sikh in a business suit—had placed his hand gently on the right shoulder of a Muslim woman in niqab, her face covered, only her eyes visible. The Empire State Building rose behind them—whether the real building or a painted backdrop, Jacob could not tell. Nothing explained what connected these two, or what had occasioned this photograph. Nothing could have. Neither of them was looking at the camera, and they were not looking at each other. Both were looking at something outside the frame—though whether in the same direction or different directions, the photograph did not say.

Jacob arranged all four on the table and stood looking at them for a long time. The afternoon light moved across the oak, crossing it slowly. The angle that had slanted sharply into the room when he first arrived had dropped and flattened, and now barely reached the edge of the table. Soon it would be gone.

He thought of the biscuit tin—the feeling of holding someone else's past in your hands. The people in these photographs were strangers. The places were places he had never been. These are not like the paintings I've studied, he thought. Paintings are art, only art. But a photograph has a photographer and a subject. Someone's time is sealed inside it. A person stood before a camera and went still—and that stillness is fixed. Whatever came after is finished. But the moment itself cannot be recovered. It cannot be thrown away. And yet it cannot be owned. It cannot be thought about, or argued over, Jacob told himself. These photographs belong to nothing now. They hang, suspended, in the air.