She knocked on the back door. Bryan poked his head out with a streak of flour across one forearm.
“What’s up?”
“Quick question. Are you in the middle of something I would make worse?”
“Always. Come in.”
She stepped inside. Heat hit her first, then the smell of butter and yeast and something citrusy. A cook was at the stove. Another worker was unloading a rack of dishes with his back to them. Bryan went back to a bowl of dough and pressed the heel of his hand into it.
“Bryan, I’m doing a portrait series. I’d like to photograph you working. Not posed, nothing fancy. I won’t get in your way and I’ll leave when you say leave. If you don’t want to, say no. It won’t be weird.”
Bryan didn’t look up from the dough. “Cassidy told me you’d probably come around.”
“Of course she did.”
“She said to say yes.”
“Cassidy doesn’t get to decide that for you.”
He looked up then. The flour had made its way from his forearm to his cheekbone. “I know. That’s why I’m saying yes. Because you just told me I didn’t have to.”
Melissa had her camera out of the bag before he finished the sentence.
She took the first frame of his hands in the dough, thumbprint-sized dimples in the pale surface where he’d worked it. She took another of him turning to his cook with a question, dough still on his fingers. She got one of him reading a recipe card, his brow pulled together in the same expression he wore when Cassidy proposed something he didn’t like.
She stayed fifteen minutes. When she got ready to leave, Bryan was folding herbs into a compound butter with the side of a knife. He didn’t stop. He just lifted his chin at her in a small salute.
“Thanks,” she said.
“You bet.”
She walked home along the seawall with her camera bag against her hip and her head still in the three workspaces she’d just stood inside.
Permission. She kept coming back to it the whole walk home.
She’d spent two years thinking about the photograph of Maria LaBelle. Replayed the hurricane morning more times than she could count. Rehearsed the apologies she couldn’t deliver and the explanations that wouldn’t have made it better. She’d looked at the picture of Maria’s hand on the back of her son’s head and known, with a clarity that had shut her down for two years, that she had never once stopped to ask. Or to help. Too busy taking photographs. And she’d never forgiven herself for that.
She’d lifted the camera and taken the shot and told herself the storm was the reason.
This morning she’d asked three people and all three had said yes. She wasn’t sure which part she was more afraid of. The asking. Or the yes.
She unlocked the door of Captain’s Watch, set the camera bag on the kitchen table, and stood for a long moment looking at it.
Then she pulled out the chair, sat down, and slipped the memory card into the laptop.
The first files came up in the preview grid view on the screen.
Jan at the machine. Jan laughing. Sally at the window. Sally writing on the clipboard. Bryan’s hands in the dough. Bryan’s face at the phone. Frame after frame of people she’d known at the edge of her life for months and who, in the space of one morning, had let her stand close enough to see them.
She scrolled slowly. She didn’t touch the exposure. She didn’t crop. She wanted to see what the camera had seen before she got her hands on it.
The difference from her architectural work was almost embarrassing, now that the two sets sat in the same folder tree. The buildings had been technically correct. Well-lit, and cleanly framed. The work of a skilled technician.
These were the work of someone who’d been let in.
She kept scrolling.
A knock came at the door.
