She didn’t remember putting it there. In the image, she was laughing, her hair shorter, her eyes wider. Next to her stood a man with a crooked smile and a guitar case slung over his shoulder. On the back, in smudged ink: Sofía + Mateo. Granada. Puente de los Suspiros. Otoño.

Her bookshelf—if you could call three stacked suitcases a bookshelf—held over fifty novels, each one frozen at a specific time and place. One Hundred Years of Solitude held the maple leaf. The House on Mango Street held the metro ticket. Love in the Time of Cholera held the beer coaster, slightly stained.

Not the flat, tasseled kind you buy in a gift shop. Sofía’s bookmarks were objects . A dried maple leaf from a park in Boston. A torn metro ticket from Mexico City. A beer coaster from a bar in Seville where a boy with green eyes had taught her the difference between te quiero and te amo . A strip of washi tape from a Kyoto stationery store. A feather from a pigeon in Paris that had landed on her shoulder as she read L’Étranger .

For the first time in her life, Sofía felt something heavier than curiosity. It was the weight of a place she had left behind. The weight of a person she had forgotten. The weight of a bookmark that had, somehow, moved on its own.