Excerpt from The Blondes by Emily Schultz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I peeled back the paper to reveal a photo of the two of us. Grinning, we were sitting on the same side of a booth in an upscale Toronto diner called the Swan. My eyes were slightly red from the flash. Hers were very blue. She had her hair in a slick ponytail that spilled gold threads over her shoulder, her face slightly turned toward me. It was last summer-oh god it was just last summer ... I could tell because my hair was still four inches above my shoulders. In a white flowing tank top of Indian cotton, Larissa looked diaphanous. In a red-checked shirt I looked both lumpy and stunned. In spite of hair that is an obsessive, salon-created, middle-of-the-road mud brown, I've never been able to wear the colour red. I'm not sure why I persist in attempting it.

I've always wondered why people who love you do that to you-give you photographs where they look beautiful, you not so much.

I thanked her and reminded her that my place would have wireless: I could look at her photos online anytime I wanted. She squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek and said, "I know, but still," and I thanked her again, shoved the photo in the side pocket, and didn't pull it out again for twenty-eight days. It wasn't that we weren't good friends-she really was my best friend-it was just that she had no idea what was going on in my life, and I didn't know how to tell her. We'd grown apart. She had her husband and toddler son, and I had-

What I'd do to have that photo back now. It was from a better time.

The second photograph was no accident. The image was of Karl. Just Karl. You'll need to know about him-but what can I tell you? I took the photo on my cellphone camera and went to the trouble of printing it out-as if to convince myself he was real, tangible, could occupy physical space. It hurts me now to know the image is out there, somewhere in the world, but without hope of recovery. I imagine Karl's face inside a file folder, or a box with my name and number on it, or buried in a recycling bin that hasn't been emptied in months.

Karl's photo had no frame, and I remember laying it over the glass of the one of me and Larissa, where it fit very well. I moved around the hotel room, holding the photo in one hand, yanking open the heavy peach curtains with the other so the daylight flooded in. In the photo Karl's in his office, staring up at the crammed bookshelves, not at me. When I close my eyes, I see him there, as if he still inhabits that space. He had known I was snapping the picture, but at the last second he'd looked away, up, as if something of great importance had distracted him.

I lay down on the bed with Karl and, beneath him, the photograph of Larissa and me. The light was coming down on his face perfectly, which was why I had gone to the trouble of having the photo printed. There are many pictures of Karl here in Grace's cabin-but not my Karl; they're of a Karl I don't really know, someone else's Karl. In the photo I snapped of him, he looked thinner than usual, younger, his hair more brown than grey, chin pointier as he craned his face upward. He usually wore glasses, but he wasn't wearing them in that shot. A white shirt, tucked in at the waist, concealed a body I knew by smell, touch, and taste, one that was whorled with small brown hairs, dotted with pockmarks, scented with sweat, semen. I shouldn't say this to you, but all the way in New York, so far away from him, there flared in my nostrils a musky smell with an underlying tang of time and neglect. Just talking about it now I can almost smell it still, and ... Why did looking at the photo conjure such a physical response? I felt panic rising in my throat like bile, and I swallowed it before it turned into a weird repulsion-desire. Karl was complex. My feelings for Karl could change quickly then. Now ... well.

I placed the photo of Karl on the dresser and turned back to the suitcase. I couldn't neglect that paper bag from the drugstore forever. I'd already avoided it for two days.

Excerpted from The Blondes by Emily Schultz. Copyright © 2015 by Emily Schultz. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.