The Photographer - Mary Carter (best romance ebooks .txt) 📗

shots: the cake, the song, blowing out the candles. If you miss them, there is no way to make up for it. They aren’t going to happen twice. No other moments of the party come close to those in magnitude and weight.

Ideally, I need to capture both parents with their child when the cake is presented. The parents rarely acknowledge it, but they want to see themselves as much as they want to see their children. They want to see themselves being good parents. They want proof. That is what I provide.

Fritz sliced the cake and handed it out to the little she-wolves. Then, like clockwork, the parents showed up and most of the children disappeared within ten minutes, except for a few stragglers.

I packed my camera case, found my coat, and was getting ready to follow, but Natalie stood in the front doorway and blocked me. “Delta! You said you’d make a balloon elephant! That’s my favorite animal!”

“Sorry, Natalie.” If I were to stay later than we’d agreed, I’d be devaluing myself and my time. And I’d also risk being viewed as intrusive. In the past, I’d occasionally made the mistake of allowing myself to become friendly with a client, and it hadn’t always ended well. But something about this family and this house was difficult to resist. The edifice itself, the rooms, the people. Every aspect of it beckoned to me.

“Please!” Natalie’s wide eyes locked with mine.

I yielded and returned to the dining area to make an elephant and a few more balloon shapes for Natalie and her remaining friends. In my peripheral vision, I could see Amelia and Fritz continuing to socialize. Fritz shook hands with the man he had been speaking to earlier and clapped him on the shoulder affectionately. “See ya, Ian.”

One by one, Natalie’s guests left, except for a precocious-looking girl named Piper, who disappeared upstairs with Natalie following her. Though it was Natalie’s house, Piper looked to be calling the shots.

When Amelia and Fritz noticed me, they appeared pleased and asked me to stay for a glass of wine. The invitation was precisely what I’d been hoping for.

In the front library, Fritz placed his glass of pinot noir on the sharp-cornered glass coffee table. “You’ve got a natural facility with kids. It’s impressive.” His green eyes—distractingly green—flashed at me through square tortoiseshell glasses. “Do you ever get tired?”

“It’s peaceful, really, spending time with them.” I noticed my nails on my wineglass and regretted my failure to get a manicure earlier that week. I imagined that a manicurist showed up at the Straub home weekly, and Amelia made business calls while an underpaid Filipino girl filed her nails.

“Do you have any of your own?” Amelia was seated next to Fritz on one of two cream-colored midcentury sofas. She leaned her back against the sofa’s arm and hugged her knees to her chest. The casual pose—faintly at odds with her feline comportment—was evidently designed to cast herself as a down-to-earth mom chatting with a girlfriend.

Itzhak whimpered at the sound of the wind outside and placed his wet muzzle on the sofa next to Amelia. Occasionally I could hear Piper’s voice from upstairs, but couldn’t make out any words.

My fingers made slight indentations in the arms of a buttery leather chair. “One son.”

“How old?” she asked, as if the answer meant a great deal to her.

“Five,” I said. “Jasper’s in California with his father. In Malibu. We recently divorced.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Amelia placed her hand on her heart in a gesture of sympathy.

“For the last two years of our marriage, Robert was having an affair.”

“So sorry,” Fritz said, but he didn’t appear terribly disturbed by the idea of an extramarital affair.

I took my cell phone out of my purse and opened my Favorites folder.

“This is Jasper.” I held up the phone so they could see the picture. “And here I am with Robert.”

“Why is Jasper in California?” Amelia’s desire for information was part and parcel of her sense of entitlement. It didn’t occur to her that any of her questions might be rude.

“His father got a job there. Robert hasn’t spent much time with Jasper recently because of his long hours. His new job gives him some flexibility. He asked if he could take Jasper for two months, and I said yes, but now I’m regretting it.” My voice sounded thin and reedy in my ears, as though it were disconnected from my diaphragm and my body. “Last week I flew there to visit him.”

“You must miss him.” Amelia frowned, and I became aware of the lines in her forehead and between her eyebrows.

The long smooth finish of the 2002 pinot noir lingered in my mouth, quite different from the malbec that I’d been drinking the night before. “Of course I do.”

Fritz leaned his body in my direction, his knee barely grazing mine, perhaps intentionally so. Amelia scratched Itzhak’s head. Neither one of them spoke. I felt obligated to fill the silence.

“In my line of work, I spend a lot of time with children. But I miss the quiet times. Reading bedtime stories. Doing puzzles together. I miss those simple activities that are so important.”

Amelia’s cell phone registered a new text. “Lauren canceled for tonight,” she said to Fritz. “She has a fever.”

“I’m sure it’s not a date or an audition.” Fritz spoke with thinly veiled sarcasm.

“And Avery’s out of town.” Amelia turned to me. “We have a client dinner tonight and our babysitter canceled.” She checked the time on her phone and laughed sharply. “We’re never going to find someone else.”

“Oh God.” I felt a wave of disappointment, disproportionate to the situation, an aching sensation in my chest when I recognized that I would probably be leaving the house shortly, but accompanying that, I saw a glimmer of possibility. “Can I help in some way?” I said.

“We’re supposed to leave in half an hour.” Amelia was pacing the room, looking through the contacts on her phone.

“Look, Amelia,” I said, “if it’s really