“Precisely!” she said, and stabbed one finger at me, like I’d fallen into the trap she’d set for me. “Lovely. Well composed. Competent.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Competence is the enemy of genius,” she said, lighting another cigarette. Dogs barked in the hallway. “You can capture reality. Bravo! That’s the easy part. You need to go deeper. You need to capture something else.”

She stared at a photo of a handsome boy in a T-shirt. “This one is a tiny bit interesting. There’s something naked in his expression. A hunger. A desperation. Very small. I don’t think you noticed it yourself.”

I hadn’t noticed it.

“I totally noticed it,” I said.

Connor. Solomon’s stepbrother. Son of Mr. Barrett, the vice principal and football coach of Hudson High School.

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“Not really. Just . . .”

“Someone you’re fucking,” she said.

I nearly swallowed my tongue. “You know that from looking at the photo?”

She shrugged. “I know it from what you just said. But yes, the photo made me think that. At any rate. I don’t believe you saw it, because if you saw it, you would have dug it out of him. Exposed it. That expression, that thing he’s hiding. That’s what photographers do.”

I wondered how I would have done that. What could I have said, or done, to coax it out of him, the thing he was trying to hide from me?

Photographing Connor, I had gotten stuck on his handsome face, on how he looked like a younger, softer version of his father. How to get past that? Beneath the surface? Sometimes Cass said things that filled me up with excitement and confidence, tips and insights that opened doors and made me feel like I could do anything, and sometimes she said things that made me feel like the most talentless hack in the entire world.

“Now this!” she said, startling me back to reality. “This is something special.”

It was the girl from that morning. The trailer park girl in the hallway, moments before all hell broke loose.

No swirling ink clouds. No monsters. What I had seen through the lens, it didn’t come through in the final image.

“Who is she?”

“No idea,” I said.

“Well. You’ve come very close, with this one. Her face is a marvel. You can see how much she’s been through.”

“So what’s missing?”

“Her smile. It’s practiced.”

“I asked her permission before I took it. So, she smiled. You always told me it’s wrong to take pictures without someone’s consent.”

“You could have paused, for a second. Two, three, maybe five. Wait for her smile to falter just the slightest bit. You could have taken one right away, and when she heard the click, she would have dropped the smile, and you could have taken a second one that she wasn’t expecting.”