But my favorite picture is the last one, the one I took of Leo when Frankie overturned her box and made her appearance. If you don’t believe in love at first sight, then I recommend you look upon the face of a man who has just met his very own beagle puppy. Once the print’s hanging by its clothespin, I gaze at it for some time. He is utterly unaware of the camera; his expression is amazed and radiant. I have always loved the smooth texture of his skin, the elasticity of Leo, the way his face is capable of expressing the tiniest nuance of emotion. Velázquez was the opposite; you could not read a single thing on his face, not a hint of what he was thinking or feeling, his past or his present. That’s why I prize that photograph of him in my bed at the Hotel Scribe, because I happened to catch a rare moment of candor, when you could look into his dark eyes and see the real Velázquez, the exasperation and hope, his earthiness and his piety.

One more photograph, on which I don’t linger long. Doris took that one, because she’s curious about my camera, and I sometimes let her use it. Imp that she is, she snapped one of me. Me! When she knows I hate having my picture taken almost as much as I hate flying. Still, it’s a good photograph, if you judge it objectively. She’s got instincts, my little sister. (I still savor those words on my tongue sometimes, sister and brother.) I’m looking at Leo—you can just see his face in the corner of the frame—and my brow is furrowed slightly, my eyebrows pointing toward each other, though my lips are just turned up at the corners, as if I’m happy and puzzled at once. My dark hair is pulled back from my face, exposing my Mallory cheekbones, and in fact everything in my face screams of my father. That expression is the expression he’s worn in a hundred newspaper photographs, like the one taken long ago in Honolulu, as he watched his Irene deliver a public speech for the first time.

I set that one aside and tuck the photograph of Leo into my father’s leather diary, along with the others I like to keep with me on my travels, Velázquez and Irene and Wesley and Doris, and of course that old snap of Sam Mallory, from the first roll of film I ever took, staring out the window of that diner in the middle of California. I stuff the diary into my satchel, packed and ready for tomorrow, and at last I lift the covers and gently slide myself into bed, next to Leo.