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“I absolutely don’t.”
I take the front of his coat and pull him down and kiss him once, and I keep it brief, because my daughter is eleven feet away and because I would like to keep the rest of it for a room with a door.
Tova points. “That.”
“Strong feedback,” Colt says.
A clerk offers to take a photograph in the corridor.
I ask Tova first. “Do you want one?”
She shrugs. “Of you two.”
I hand over my phone. Colt stands beside me, the clerk lifts it, and Tova stays back against the wall where she can see all of us.
“Ready?”
My hand finds his. The clerk takes one picture.
Then Tova says, “Wait.”
Everybody stops. She comes over and stands beside me, and then she looks at the screen.
“No. Move.”
Colt moves.
She steps into the middle of us. “Don’t do the hockey smile.”
“What’s the hockey smile?”
“The one where your teeth look sponsored.”
I laugh, and the clerk takes the picture while I am still doing it.
Tova looks at the screen. “That one.”
I study it.
It is evidence.
It is also the only picture that exists of the three of us, and the child in the middle of it put herself there.
“Don’t send it to Mormor yet,” she says.
“I will not.”
“I want to.”
“Then you will.”
She takes the phone out of my hand.
Choice made.
Chapter twenty-one
Colt