“Okay, so,” she started. Their middle child, one of the most sullen, uncooperative children she had ever worked with, refused to do anything but scowl. “I’m wondering if we can get a few with everyone smiling.”

Middle boy narrowed his eyes and deepened the already dark, furrowed creases in his forehead. The father smiled while also looking completely annoyed, while the mother’s eyes gave away her stress. The youngest child, a four-year-old girl in a florescent pink dress that would completely counterbalance every other person in her family wearing jeans and a white shirt, despite Eileen’s explicit instructions to avoid white shirts, wandered away from the shot to inspect a black beetle on a flat, smooth stone nearby.

Only their oldest child, a boy of maybe eight, had enthusiastically smiled for every single shot they had taken so far.

Eileen sighed to herself, careful to do her best to hide her frustration from the clients. “Okay, so far so good. I’m thinking maybe now is a good time for a quick five-, ten-minute break.”

“Sounds good to me,” the father said as he pulled his cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans. The mother nodded and headed for her large purse, which she’d left on a nearby bench.

Eileen turned away from them. It’s money, Eileen. Family portraits helped pay the mortgage—the same way weddings, graduations, promotional and publicity events, and the occasional bar mitzvah did. Landscapes, stills, and every artistic photo she’d ever taken did not.

“You’re lucky to get to do it at all,” Eric had snapped when she had once complained to him about a difficult family. “Would you rather be sitting in a cubicle? Would you rather be chained to a desk working on a spreadsheet, writing reports, watching the clock, and praying for five o’clock?” he had continued.

Because that was exactly what she used to do. And she had hated every minute of it.

Eileen closed her eyes, but she kind of hated this too. Not as much, that was true. At least she got to spend her days with her camera in her hands. And certainly it was miles away from the confinement of the cubicle. But spending her days directing and constructing sullen families into image-worthy poses—it didn’t do much to alleviate that sense of abysmal failure that had begun a slow creep into her own life image lately.

Eileen grabbed a new lens and attached it to the front of her camera as she turned back to her client family. The dad was still on his phone, and the mom was waiting for the youngest to finish drinking from her spill-proof cup. That was when Eileen saw it, the top third barely peeking out from the mom’s purse—Clare Collins, in a large gold font.