“Can I ask you something?” Clint said.
“Yeah.”
“The photos you took. The ones of me from that day when Sean showed up. Were they really that good?”
She didn’t hesitate. “They were the best work I’ve ever done.”
He absorbed that. She watched him turn it over, saw the complicated thing moving behind his eyes. Pride, maybe. Or grief for what those images had cost them both.
“I’m not saying right now,” he said slowly. “And I’m not making a promise. But maybe someday. When I’m ready. I’ll let you take those pictures again.”
Her breath caught. She understood what he was offering. Not the photos themselves. It was more. It was the willingness to be seen like that again.
“Only when you’re ready,” she said. “And only if you’re sure.”
“I know.” He looked at her, and the corner of his mouth moved. That almost-smile she’d come to know as well as her own reflection. “But I wanted you to know the door isn’t locked.”
She leaned forward and kissed him. Softer than the first time. His hand came up to the back of her neck and she felt his fingers in her damp hair, and the kiss lasted long enough that when she pulled back she had to remember to breathe.
“Stay for dinner,” she said. “I have leftover soup and probably bread that isn’t stale.”
“Probably?”
“I can check.”
He laughed. Not the guarded half-sounds she’d heard from him for months, but a full laugh that lit his face and made her chest ache in the best possible way.
“Soup sounds good,” he said.
She stood up and went to the kitchen. Behind her, she heard him get up from the couch and follow. She opened the refrigerator and pulled out the container of soup and set it on the counter, and when she turned around he was leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room with his arms crossed and her too-small T-shirt stretched across his shoulders, watching her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” But he was smiling. Really smiling.
She turned back to the stove and put the soup on to heat. Clint came up beside her, opened the bread box, and pulled out the loaf. He checked it. “It’s borderline,” he reported.
“Toast it.”
He found the toaster. She stirred the soup. They moved around each other in the small kitchen with an ease that shouldn’t have existed yet. She’d spent two years avoiding exactly this. The ordinariness of another person in her space. The quiet negotiation of shared movement. She’d told herself she didn’t need it, didn’t want it, and was better off alone where she couldn’t do damage.
The toast popped. Clint put it on a plate and brought it to the table. She ladled soup into two bowls and carried them over. They sat across from each other at her small kitchen table while the rain tapered off and the last of the daylight faded.
Chapter 26
Melissa walked into the gallery, and Grant had hung the portraits in a single line along the gallery’s west wall. She couldn’t stop staring at them.
She’d arrived early, before the doors opened, telling herself she needed to check the lighting and the print quality. All true. But the real reason was that she needed to stand in front of her own work and not run.
Sally Morris. Jan. Bryan in his kitchen with flour on his forearm. Winnie in the keeper’s quarters with window light falling across her hands. Emily mid-laugh, caught between brushstrokes. The behind-the-scenes festival shots and other town images filled the opposite wall. Cassidy was mid-phone-call with a clipboard tucked under one arm, and next to that, Sally haggling with a vendor over candle prices, one finger raised.
Every person in the photographs had said yes. Every one of them knew the image existed. She took a deep breath.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor.” Grant came up beside her, adjusting one of the hanging wires a fraction of an inch. He stepped back and studied the line. “They look good, Mel.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I’ve been doing this a long time.” He glanced at her. “And I’ve never seen you this nervous.”
