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Moni laughed. “Don’t temptme.”
Nina and her friends — including Moni — had group potlucks every couple of weeks, but this week Moni’s daughter Angela was having an epic sleepover for her twelfthbirthday.
“We’ll miss you.” Nina picked up her bag. “Tell Angela I hope she has a greatparty.”
Nina had been touched to be included in the small group of family and close friends Moni had hosted the week before to celebrate Angela’s actual birthday. Two years earlier, she couldn’t have imagined that stumbling into the Stockholm Gallery would result in a new job, a new passion, and one of the best friends she’d everhad.
“Will do. Have an extra glass of wine for me,” Monisaid.
“You don’t need to twist my arm on that one,” Nina said. “See youtomorrow.”
She pushed open the gallery door and stepped onto the street, the cold February air a rude awakening after the warmth of the gallery. She tucked her face into her scarf and ducked her head, her hand reaching automatically into her bag, fingers wrapping around the old Leica camera Judith had left Nina along with the photographs on the wall at thegallery.
She’d gotten used to the feel of the vintage camera in her hands over the past few months, had gotten used to pulling it out, overcome with the urge to memorialize seemingly unimportant moments. It had become second nature to throw the camera into her bag whenever she left her apartment, to walk with her hand covering it like the little old ladies on the Upper West Side who caressed their tiny dogs in luxury carriers that looked like fancyhandbags.
She descended to the subway and stood on the platform, crowded with Friday night commuters. Five months ago, right after she’d broken things off with Jack and spotted Liam on the street, she’d had to work not to search every crowd for his blond head, his broad shoulders rising above the rest of the crowd. She’d slowly gotten used to the idea that they occupied the same cityagain.
He’d spent most of the year after their breakup in Africa, working as a freelance photographer. The details had been sketchy — she’d wanted them that way — but one afternoon she was desperate for news of him and had made the mistake of turning to the internet only to find him smiling into the camera with a pretty blondwoman.
At the time, in spite of her feverish relationship with Jack, Liam's face had hit her like a punch in the stomach. She’d thought about him often: when she caught a particularly powerful image with the Leica, when she looked at the picture he’d sent to her apartment after their breakup, a photograph that had been the beginning of her job at the gallery and her relationship withLiam.
But she’d made peace with it. The months she’d spent with Jack — circling the drain around her sexual obsession, letting him gag her and tie her up, losing sleep and forgetting to eat for the sexual fantasies that occupied her brain, wanting to go further and further and further — had scared her. She knew she was lost when she’d let him dress her in an uncharacteristically revealing dress and take her to a country bar upstate, when he’d gotten her drunk and arranged for a stranger to watch them have sex in a filthy publicbathroom.
When she hadn’t cared because all she’d wanted was for him to fuckher.
Shame lingered around her memories of the incident. She knew it was irrational. She was a grown woman, entitled to do whatever she wanted with her body with whomever she wanted to do it with, but societal norms and expectations were hard to shake, especially when you’d spent nearly fifty years with one set ofthem.
Moni mentioned Liam occasionally — they’d been friends before Nina started working at the gallery — but Nina could never tell if it was an opening or just casualconversation.
It didn’t matter. Nina was busy with her own life. The last thing she needed was to get caught up in someone again. Of all the damage her relationship with Jack had done, her loss of self-control was the most lasting. She had it back now, but there was always a voice in the back of her head, reminding her how easy it had been to loseherself.
Reminding herself of the cost if she let it happenagain.
