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

at the ground, as if she didn’t want to meet my eyes. “I need to go upstairs and make a quick phone call.” She turned abruptly and left.

Initially she’d said she wanted to stay for the whole morning.

I turned my attention to unloading the dishwasher, which I’d run the night before. I placed all the bowls on one shelf and the plates on a different shelf. When finished with that task, I loaded the washing machine and folded the towels that I’d left in the dryer. I’d purchased expensive Turkish towels when I’d moved. I enjoyed folding them and running my hands over them.

Then I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat on the patio outside my back door. I contemplated the cherry tree, the birds, the sunshine, and found all of it too perfect this morning. I felt certain there was a flaw hidden somewhere.

I heard an incoming text on my phone. It was from Amelia. We have a problem here. Please come upstairs.

My stomach dropped. Something bad was about to happen or had already happened.

I wrote back: Sure. Just a few minutes.

Natalie had appeared disturbed by something. What had happened to her? The floor underneath my feet was shifting. I needed to know the nature of the problem. I couldn’t walk into the Straubs’ house defenseless, without the necessary tools.

In the bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face and dried it. Then I applied moisturizer, under-eye concealer, mascara, and lip gloss. I combed through my hair. Finally I was pleased with my reflection in the mirror.

I walked up the stairs, entered the Straubs’ front door, and proceeded down the hallway. From across the room, I could see that Amelia, Fritz, and Natalie were all seated around the dining table. The morning sun was shooting in through the skylight from above and through the bifold doors. Amelia’s skin looked bright white in the sun. Her lips had disappeared, but her dark eyes were taking up more space than usual in her face. Next to her, Fritz sat expressionless, his eyes flat and dull. Seated across the table, Natalie was looking down, seemingly focused on pointing and flexing her bare feet.

As I approached, I could see that Amelia was holding something in front of her. I took a few steps toward her. It looked to be a thick pile of papers in her hand. I took a few more steps and could now tell it was a stack of photographs. I neared the table, close enough to see the edge of the top photo, and then recognized it. I felt the ground dropping out from underneath me.

It was a graphic photo of me and Fritz in bed together—including a computer-generated image of Fritz’s naked groin that I’d photoshopped and fine-tuned until it appeared completely realistic. I’d scrupulously deleted all such photos from my hard drive, but I’d chosen to keep a few of the prints.

I was falling. “Oh God,” I said. “That was … was so stupid.”

“What is this?” Amelia whispered.

Fritz looked up at me, as though he were hoping for a valid explanation.

Amelia flipped to the second photo in the stack. Then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth. She laid them out on the dining table in front of her. They were photos of me and Fritz in different sexual positions. Over the last few months, whenever I’d been bored, I’d gone back to these photos. Sexual experimentation in the photographs had been exciting for me.

I tried to laugh, but it came out sounding like a cackle. “Oh God, see, I had a photo-editing challenge with my colleague.…”

“What … what the hell?” She held up a photo of me, Fritz, and her in bed together. A ménage à trois.

I felt myself to be in free fall, in a vertical drop. “… and we were using a new program, trying to create realistic photos … and…”

Amelia stood up from her place at the dining table, her face moist and pink and her eyes cloudy. She looked feverish and wild. “Are you fucking Fritz?” she bellowed into the atmosphere.

“No!” Fritz yelled loudly.

“Amelia…” I said.

“Yes or no?” she said.

“No!” My mind raced for a way to escape. I looked around the room for possible exits. Itzhak was crouched low in the corner, growling.

“What is it?” Amelia gasped. “Barbie and Ken having sex? Are you so desperate you need to fuck my husband in a picture?”

She fanned the remainder of the photos out like a hand of cards. Then she placed them back on the table in a stack, and separated them out, one by one. I held my breath. She came to one of herself and me drinking martinis at Buttermilk Channel, then one in which I was very pregnant and we were shopping on Court Street, then one of me cooking in the Straubs’ kitchen, and one of her feeding me birthday cake. And next, the photo of Jasper lying asleep in Natalie’s room.

“Is this your son?” She looked disoriented.

A pit of nausea in my stomach was making its way to my throat. “Yes,” I said quietly.

“When was he here?”

I searched for the correct response to the question. “He was—”

Layers of her confusion seemed to obstruct her speech. “When … when … was he in the house?”

“I was—”

“Why is he in Natalie’s room? Why is he in the photo?”

“It wasn’t—”

“Is it really your son?”

“I…”

“Who is it?”

She came to another shot of Jasper and his family. My clients.

“It’s not your son, is it?”

In addition to a growing panic, a deep anger was threatening to overtake me. I resented Amelia’s disrespectful tone.

Her voice blasted through the house. “DO YOU HAVE A SON?”

“Jasper is my son.” I believed in Jasper. I clung tightly to his image in my head.

Natalie was still looking away, resting her head in her hands.

Amelia came to another group of photos. Lucia. A sharp pain made its way through my skull. It was one of the photoshopped versions and I had drawn a large red X on the photo.

“It’s a picture