Chapter 44: The Photograph
Julien and Maxime left Chloé’s building shortly before midnight. They walked side by side toward the metro station, still talking about the evening. Maxime slipped his hands back into his pockets.
“I think you’ve adopted him.”
“Who?”
“Aldric.”
Julien smiled.
“He’s a nice guy.”
“You’ve already planned another night with him.”
“Because he’s never really played video games before. That needs to be fixed.”
“You’re going to turn it into a competition again.”
“Not at all.”
“You spent ten minutes trying to explain to him that beating a boss while using four potions was still a perfectly respectable victory. And he explained why it mostly proved you were bad at managing your resources.”
Julien burst out laughing.
“He’s unbearable once he starts figuring something out.”
They headed down into the metro and waited on the platform. Julien checked his phone while Maxime watched the display showing the next trains. Several new messages had appeared in their group chat.
Julien had suggested making their next get-together a video game night, Chloé had immediately refused to host everyone at her place again, and Sarah had approved the idea.
Chloé sent another photo. Aldric had been caught in the middle of laughing.
Chloé: Historical evidence.
Julien: SAVE THIS.
Maxime: I thought it was a special effect.
Julien put his phone away when their train pulled into the station.
“You’re still changing at République?” Maxime asked.
“Yeah.”
“I get off before that.”
A few stops later, Maxime got off. Julien raised a hand through the window before the doors closed, then took out his phone again. He went through the new messages, replied to something Sarah had said, and spent the rest of the journey watching the stations pass by.
By the time he got home, it was a little after midnight. Julien dropped his keys into the tray by the entrance, took off his shoes, hung up his jacket, and crossed the living room. He grabbed a glass from the kitchen, filled it with water, and went to his desk.
He sat down, pressed the power button on his computer, and waited for both monitors to come to life. While it booted up, he set his phone beside the keyboard and took a few sips of water. His eyes drifted to the time displayed in the corner of the screen. He had work the next day, but he wasn’t tired yet.
He unlocked his phone. Several more messages had appeared in the group chat. Julien skimmed through them before scrolling back up to the photograph Chloé had sent.
Aldric was laughing.
“Historical evidence…”
He was in the center of the picture, but a few yards behind him stood Emma. She wasn’t looking at Chloé or Sarah. Her attention was on Aldric.
Julien’s smile disappeared. He zoomed in on the photograph and brought the phone closer to his face. Emma had one hand resting near her glass, her body turned toward Aldric, her eyes fixed on him.
“No…”
He zoomed in again, but the limits of his phone screen kept him from seeing much more. He set the device down on his desk, opened WhatsApp on his computer, and downloaded the photograph. A few seconds later, it filled his main monitor.
Julien opened it in full screen, used the mouse wheel to zoom in, and moved the image until Emma’s face filled the frame. The resolution wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to make out her expression.
She was smiling.
“It’s nothing…”
He returned to the full image, then zoomed in again. This time, he framed Aldric, then Emma, then both of them together.
“Why are you looking at him like that?”
Julien closed the image, waited a few seconds, then opened it again.
He had known Emma long enough to recognize many of her expressions. He knew what she looked like when a client called her during an evening out, when she found something funny, or when she was trying to be polite. He knew the slight shift in her eyes when she wasn’t convinced by what someone was telling her, and the way she sometimes tried to hold back a smile before bursting into laughter.
He liked this particular expression a lot less.
Julien grabbed the mouse, made a copy of the file, and cropped the image around Emma. He stared at it for a moment before shaking his head.
“It’s just a coincidence…”
He returned to the photograph once again. Aldric was laughing, and Emma was looking at him. There was no hand resting on his arm, no ambiguous gesture, no sign of them getting particularly close. Just a photograph taken at the wrong moment.
Julien clenched his jaw and opened File Explorer. He navigated through several folders, going from Documents to Personal Archives, then opened a directory containing several subfolders organized by year.
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
Julien opened the last one. Several folders appeared.
Work
Family
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Friends
Emma
He opened the one dedicated to Emma. Hundreds of photographs filled the window. Some came from birthdays, dinners, or outings with the group. Others had been sent through their WhatsApp conversations or saved from Emma and Chloé’s social media accounts over the years.
Emma was everywhere: sitting on a terrace with Sarah, standing outside a restaurant with Chloé, walking through a park, sitting on a couch during a party, or standing by the sea.
Julien scrolled through the files. Most of these pictures could easily have been sitting on any of their friends’ computers, but some were much harder to explain. Several group photographs had been cropped so that Emma appeared alone, while in another, Sarah had almost disappeared from the frame despite originally standing right beside her.
He opened another subfolder: Favorites.
Several dozen files appeared. Julien opened one of Emma laughing on a terrace a few years earlier, then another of her reading a restaurant menu. In a third photograph, she was looking out the window of a train.
Julien knew the date of almost every one of them. He didn’t even need to check the filenames to remember which one had been taken after Chloé’s birthday in 2021, which came from a day in Brittany, or which Sarah had sent to their group after a night out.
He kept scrolling until he reached the most recent files. For years, the same faces had appeared around Emma: Chloé, Sarah, Maxime, Julien himself, and a handful of other friends and acquaintances.
Then Aldric appeared.
The first photographs he was in had been taken at the bar. Julien opened one where the group was sitting around the table. Aldric was at one end, with Emma a little closer to the center. In another, Chloé was laughing while Maxime looked in their direction. Aldric was there again in the background.
He moved on to another photograph, then another, without finding anything more. Julien returned to the pictures from the bar. This time, he stopped looking at everyone else. He found Emma, searched for Aldric, then checked where each of them was looking. Whenever they appeared in the same frame, he zoomed in, but none of the photographs showed anything suspicious.
Still, Julien kept going. He compared two photographs, returned to the previous one, then opened a third. Little by little, something else began to bother him. It wasn’t what he was finding in the photographs, but how often the same face kept appearing around Emma.
A few months earlier, Aldric hadn’t appeared in a single one of these pictures.
Now he was everywhere.
Julien returned to the main folder and checked the dates. The earliest photographs were all recent, and almost despite himself, he started counting them. He found one, then three, six, and finally nine before stopping.
“Seriously?”
Julien opened the 2025 folder and looked through the thumbnails. No Aldric. He moved on to 2024, then 2023, even though he already knew what he would find.
Aldric wasn’t there.
When he returned to the 2026 folder, the nine photographs suddenly seemed like a lot more. In just a few months, Aldric had gone from a stranger Emma had told them about to someone who appeared in their pictures, joined their nights out, and joked around with people she had known for years.
He was part of the group now and, more importantly, part of Emma’s life.
Julien took the photograph from that evening and moved it into the folder before renaming it Sarah_birthday_01.jpg.
He made a copy, then cropped the image until only Emma and Aldric remained. The cursor blinked in the filename field before he typed Emma_Aldric.jpg.
Julien stared at their names side by side, his expression hardening. He considered choosing a different name, then abandoned the idea and confirmed it. The new photograph joined the others as he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms.
He had known Emma for years. Long before Aldric. Long before this absurd story about being a knight from another world who had killed a Demon King.
He had been there for her birthdays, her bad days, the times she complained about a client, and the times she disappeared from the group for several days because she had too much work. Emma messaged him, sometimes because she needed something and sometimes for no particular reason. She accepted his invitations, laughed at his jokes, occasionally asked for his opinion, and knew him well enough to notice when he was making up an excuse.
To Julien, all of that had always meant something. Emma didn’t tell just anyone about her life. If she was still messaging him after all these years, it meant he held a special place in it. If she accepted his invitations, it was because she liked spending time with him. When she asked him for advice, it proved she trusted him more than other people.
And she was still single.
Julien had never seen that as a problem. Quite the opposite. He had always told himself she needed time. He didn’t want to rush her. They had known each other long enough that there was no point forcing anything.
One day, she would realize.
It was obvious.
Julien had seen a few men come and go over the years, but none of them had ever worried him. Some relationships had disappeared almost as quickly as they had begun, while others had never made it past a few dates.
He, on the other hand, was still there.
So he had never had any reason to worry.
Until Aldric.
Julien reopened Emma_Aldric.jpg.
“And you show up now.”
He opened an older photograph of Emma with Chloé and himself. After zooming in on her face, he murmured, “You know perfectly well who’s been here from the beginning.”
Another photograph showed Emma smiling in his direction.
“There.”
He closed it and returned to the one with Aldric. The problem wasn’t that Emma spent time with him. She had always spent time with plenty of people. What bothered Julien was how quickly Aldric had become important.
A few months.
Just a few months.
Aldric had arrived without knowing how a phone worked, without understanding the customs of their world, and with a way of speaking that sometimes made it sound as though he had learned French from a textbook written in anothe
Julien already knew part of the story: the apartment, the paperwork, the phone, the outings, and all the situations where Emma had needed to explain something to him.
Then she had introduced him to her friends. And now Aldric didn’t even need her to belong to the group anymore. Sarah talked to him, Chloé invited him places, Maxime joked around with him, and Julien himself had just invited him to another night out.
That last thought made him freeze.
He stared at the screen.
“Shit.”
He had just helped Aldric fit in even more. Julien straightened.
“Why did I do that?”
He already knew the answer. Until that photograph, Aldric had only been a strange man Emma had met and everyone found amusing. Julien had never had any reason to see him as anything else.
His gaze returned to Emma.
The anger came rushing back.
“A few months.”
He pushed his chair back and stood.
“A few months!”
The chair rolled away behind him as he started pacing across the living room.
“I’ve been waiting for years.”
He ran a hand through his hair, then looked at the screen from across the room.
“And you just show up with your sword. You tell everyone you’re from another world, that you killed a Demon King, and everyone thinks it’s amazing.”
Aldric was still laughing in the photograph. Julien walked back toward the desk.
“What do you want from her?”
He stared at Aldric’s face for a few seconds before his gaze shifted back to Emma.
“And what does she even see in you?”
His hand tightened around the back of his chair.
“You’re not even funny.”
He stopped immediately, remembering the evening that had just ended.
“Okay. Sometimes.”
The concession only seemed to irritate him more.
“So what?”
Julien started pacing again.
“You don’t understand anything. She has to explain everything to you.”
He stopped.
A new thought had just occurred to him.
“Is that it?”
Aldric needed Emma. Maybe there was nothing else to understand. Emma had always liked helping people, and she had met someone who seemed completely lost. She had gotten used to looking after him and had grown attached to that responsibility.
Not to Aldric.
“That explains everything.”
He returned to the computer.
“That has to be it.”
His explanation should have reassured him, but it didn’t. Emma wasn’t looking at Aldric like someone she needed to help fill out forms, and Julien was certain of that.
His phone vibrated on the desk. He looked down and saw a new message in the group chat.
Aldric: I’ll be there.
His gaze shifted from the phone to the screen, where Emma and Aldric appeared together, and his jaw tightened.
“Of course you’re coming, asshole.”
Julien placed his fingers on the keyboard and replied:
Julien: Here he goes again 😂
Chloé reacted with an emoji, and Sarah added a thumbs-up. He set his phone back on the desk. Silence returned to the apartment as he continued staring at the photograph, then left the folder dedicated to Emma and went back to Personal Archives.
He moved the photograph to his second monitor, then right-clicked and selected New Folder. When the cursor appeared in the name field, he typed ALDRIC DE VALDOR.
Julien confirmed it, opened the folder, and created a text document titled Aldric de Valdor: Information. The cursor blinked on the first line before he started typing:
Name: Aldric de Valdor
Age: Unknown
Current occupation: Mover
Claimed origin: Valdor
Claimed former occupation: Knight / Military Commander
Julien reread the last line.
“Of course. Why start as an intern?”
He moved to the next line.
Weapon: Sword
Known arrival in France: 2026
All the information came from things Aldric had told the group, which still left the document rather sparse. He added a new category:
Relationship with Emma:
His gaze drifted to the second monitor, where the photograph was still open and Emma was looking at Aldric.
Relationship with Emma: To be determined.
He stared at those last words for a moment, then placed his hands back on the keyboard.
“We’ll start there.”