I stood there staring at her door, feeling helpless.

How do you help a girl who might very well need help but tells you that she doesn’t?

It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with Christie one time when we were going through a rough spot in our relationship and I finally blurted out, “Listen, it seems like you don’t want me to solve your problem—all you want me to do is sit here listening to you talk about it!”

“Exactly!” she’d exclaimed.

Women are a mystery I will never understand.

But in this case, Tessa didn’t even want me to sit around listening to her talk about her problem, so where did that leave me?

I assured her that I was here if she needed anything, heard no response except the sound of more crying, and at last, unsure what else to do, I walked to my room and tried Christie’s number. Not surprisingly, no one picked up. I left a message. “Hey, Tessa’s feeling a little . . . well . . . out of sorts. If you get this, give me a call. I hope your retreat is going well.” Then I added, “I love you.”

And, of course, silence was all that I heard in reply.

14

Maybe it was just the recent studying she’d done on feng shui, trying to make sure the settings were as ideal as they could be when she took her photographs, but to Julianne, although nothing about Timothy Sabian’s living room seemed unusual or out of the ordinary, nothing quite seemed in place either. It was an odd effect. The room wasn’t in disarray, but something about the placement of the furniture and the arrangement of the room was off.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” he asked her as she followed him into the kitchen. “I don’t have much—some vodka and vermouth.”

She didn’t anticipate being here long, but if she did accept a drink it might make it more awkward for him to ask her to leave before she was done explaining herself.

“Vodka,” she said. “Thank you.”

When he opened the freezer, she noticed that, apart from some ice, the vodka bottle, and two TV dinners, the freezer was empty.

Timothy poured a glass for each of them, then gestured toward the living room. Once they were both seated, he said, “Now, tell me what you’re here about.”

“Perhaps it would be best if I showed you.” She took out her iPad. “Let me just pull up a site.”

“What site is that?”

“You’ll see.”

She clicked to a website containing a series of black-and-white photographs that had been taken at the turn of the twentieth century.

She scrolled through half a dozen of them. “You see how in each of these, one person’s face is clear and well-defined while the faces of everyone else are slightly blurry?”