There was a long silence, the buzz and hum of the garden below them the only sound in the room. Jess eventually spoke. “There are some people I should speak to first.” Then Jessica May turned a smile toward D’Arcy that was striking, but it also held a kind of sadness that made D’Arcy move suddenly to her side and touch her hand. “I suppose I can’t very well expect to photograph you if I won’t return the favor,” Jess finished, then she waited as if she expected D’Arcy to say something, but D’Arcy didn’t speak.

“You’re supposed to say, Oh, you don’t have to if you’d rather not,” Jess said, smiling more naturally this time. “But I can tell that you don’t do false politeness. So yes, you can film a documentary. But, as I said, there are others I would need to talk to before you could show it to anyone. Would you give me some time?”

“Of course.” D’Arcy grinned at last and tried not to bounce up and down like a child. “If I say this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me would you think I was completely ridiculous?”

Jess laughed. “I would be very flattered. Thank you for coming to see me. If you do notice me around with my camera, try to ignore me. And come back when you want to interview me. You have free rein to film anything you choose in the meantime.”

She was dismissed. Which was just as well because she wasn’t sure how much longer she could be so demure in the face of something so incredible. As D’Arcy walked out of the room, her eye caught a photograph propped on a table, directly in Jess’s line of sight. Two people, the moment before they kissed, love for one another caught as recognizably on their faces as the fact that they had eyelashes or noses. It was an imperfect photograph of an intensely private moment, real beyond anything D’Arcy had ever seen in all of the posed and photoshopped and cropped pictures that dominated contemporary life. It was the kind of picture that made D’Arcy want to reach into the frame and extract the two people so that they could have the kiss the photographer had forever prevented them from sharing. At the same time, she wanted the draft from the door to tip the frame over so it would fall face down and D’Arcy would no longer be able to see it—the man was the same one from the photograph with Victorine. Dan Hallworth. And the woman was Jessica May.

D’Arcy walked back down the stairs slowly, exhilaration flooding out of her like a waterfall. There, in front of her eyes, where there had been the photograph of moments before, was the question Jess had so carefully not answered: why, after all this time, would Jessica May reveal herself to D’Arcy? And the realization—that D’Arcy hadn’t actually asked about Victorine—carried like deceit in her stomach.