I tried to laugh, but it came out sounding like a cackle. “Oh God, see, I had a photo-editing challenge with my colleague.…”

“What … what the hell?” She held up a photo of me, Fritz, and her in bed together. A ménage à trois.

I felt myself to be in free fall, in a vertical drop. “… and we were using a new program, trying to create realistic photos … and…”

Amelia stood up from her place at the dining table, her face moist and pink and her eyes cloudy. She looked feverish and wild. “Are you fucking Fritz?” she bellowed into the atmosphere.

“No!” Fritz yelled loudly.

“Amelia…” I said.

“Yes or no?” she said.

“No!” My mind raced for a way to escape. I looked around the room for possible exits. Itzhak was crouched low in the corner, growling.

“What is it?” Amelia gasped. “Barbie and Ken having sex? Are you so desperate you need to fuck my husband in a picture?”

She fanned the remainder of the photos out like a hand of cards. Then she placed them back on the table in a stack, and separated them out, one by one. I held my breath. She came to one of herself and me drinking martinis at Buttermilk Channel, then one in which I was very pregnant and we were shopping on Court Street, then one of me cooking in the Straubs’ kitchen, and one of her feeding me birthday cake. And next, the photo of Jasper lying asleep in Natalie’s room.

“Is this your son?” She looked disoriented.

A pit of nausea in my stomach was making its way to my throat. “Yes,” I said quietly.

“When was he here?”

I searched for the correct response to the question. “He was—”

Layers of her confusion seemed to obstruct her speech. “When … when … was he in the house?”

“I was—”

“Why is he in Natalie’s room? Why is he in the photo?”

“It wasn’t—”

“Is it really your son?”

“I…”

“Who is it?”

She came to another shot of Jasper and his family. My clients.

“It’s not your son, is it?”

In addition to a growing panic, a deep anger was threatening to overtake me. I resented Amelia’s disrespectful tone.

Her voice blasted through the house. “DO YOU HAVE A SON?”

“Jasper is my son.” I believed in Jasper. I clung tightly to his image in my head.

Natalie was still looking away, resting her head in her hands.

Amelia came to another group of photos. Lucia. A sharp pain made its way through my skull. It was one of the photoshopped versions and I had drawn a large red X on the photo.

“It’s a picture of Lucia,” Amelia said. “Why do you have it?”

“I took a few shots of her.”

“What does the X mean?”

“It’s not—”

“Why do you have it? WHAT DID YOU DO TO LUCIA?”

I backed away from her toward the kitchen island.