Beth wrote CLOSED TODAY on a piece of paper and didn't know what to put beneath it.
Claire stood beside her at the studio window on Sunday morning. The opening hours were still on the glass, bright and cheerful, promising something the room could not give. Behind them, the cups waited in an uneven line on the table. Nobody had washed them last night.
“Opening postponed,” Claire suggested.
Beth added it. Then she set down the pen, looked at the paper, and drew a line under today so that it didn't look like forever.
They fixed it inside the window. A woman across the street slowed to read, looked at them through the glass, and moved on. Claire wanted to explain. Beth turned away before she could.
“We'll put it on the page,” her sister said. “That's enough.”
Maris came down carrying a bin bag. She had slept badly and said so without making anyone offer sympathy. The biscuit bowl had survived. Ruth's cup hadn't. One price card was damp enough that the ink had run into the pattern Vivian drew around it.
Claire washed cups. Beth picked the card up, studied it, and set it aside instead of putting it in the bin. Work that could be saved was still work.
Vivian arrived later, without the red wrap. She had spoken to someone at the hospital and said Graham was alive, still being treated for serious injuries. Claire felt relief and then shame at needing relief for a man she had made dead in an image.
“I don't know more,” Vivian said. “Not yet.”
Beth nodded. “You don't need to make it better than that.”
Vivian looked at the closed sign. “I'm sorry.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to be useful here.”
“Then help me take the dresses out of the bags.”
They checked for damage. One hanging bag had a scrape, another a muddy mark. The dress under the trolley needed cleaning but wasn't torn. Vivian held the hem while Beth looked, their attention returning in fits rather than settling completely.
Claire watched them and remembered the sound of Graham's head on the paving. It came back whenever the room became quiet. She had slept for an hour, perhaps two, then woken with her hands held away from the sheets though she had washed them.
There would be more accounts to give. Vivian had given hers on Wednesday and added to it last night. Evan had told the shove as a shove, not something the picture excused. Claire had the fabricated file, the ordinary source images, the messages. None would become true because the real pose had occurred beside them.
Vivian sat by the cutting table with the folder for the collection Graham had financed open. She took out two pages, put them back, then separated them again.
“I'm not doing this line,” she said.
“You told the supplier,” Beth replied.
“I know. I keep finding places I haven't told myself.”
Claire sat across from her. There was no consoling way to point at the little wraps and call them enough. They weren't the collection. They might be something Vivian could still make, at a price she would have to work out herself.
“What do you need kept?” Claire asked.
Vivian looked at the folder. “The drawings. Even the stupid ones.”
“They're not stupid.”
“Some of them are. Keep those too.”
They put the drawings into a clean envelope. Vivian wrote her name on it, without Graham's. Then she helped Beth fold the red wrap and put it back on the rail.
Near noon Maris went upstairs to rest. Vivian left to finish another part of her account, saying she would call Beth afterward. The studio grew quiet around the sisters.
Claire dried the last cup and put it away.
“I'm sorry I tried to turn your work into my version,” she said.
Beth sat on the new bench, elbows on her knees. She looked exhausted enough that Claire wanted to tell her to go home and sleep. She did not.
“Which part?” Beth asked.
“The assistant offer. The launch pictures. The hotel.” Claire twisted the cloth. “You'd ask for one thing and I'd bring you six.”
Beth looked at the rail Evan had made. “I did let you help.”
“I know. I kept making help bigger.”
“You made a picture of him dead.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn't helping me.”
“No.”
“When you wouldn't tell me the address,” Claire said, “I felt as though you were doing something to me. You weren't. You were staying somewhere.”
Beth nodded slowly.
“You can still be worried,” she said.
“I will be.”
“I know.”
For the first time the words sounded almost affectionate. Claire folded the cloth and put it by the sink.
“What do you want me to do today?”
Beth considered it. “Take the damaged dress to be cleaned. Send Ruth the photographs she asked for. Don't write to Caroline.”
“I won't.”
“And then go home. I need a minute here without people asking if I'm all right.”
Claire nodded. She took the dress bag, waited while Beth checked the name inside it, and left without proposing another date for the opening.
Lewis came to Claire's house that afternoon before Evan arrived. She put Claire's original email on the desk, printed out, with the list of attachments beneath it.
“You sent me the wedding sequence.”
“Most of it.”
“When did you decide to leave this one out?”
Claire had the service-road image open. She told Lewis about the Saturday-night transfer and the following afternoon's date on the file. Lewis wrote down both.
“And when I called on Monday?”
“I knew who he was. I hadn't photographed him there. I thought if I gave you this I'd have to explain something I couldn't.”
“You chose the explanation you could give me.”
Claire nodded. Lewis waited until she said yes.
They went through the transfers. Claire showed her the untouched file, the later images, including the mirror which had not injured Beth's hand. She showed her the yard composite with its separate layers, then the message claiming it had arrived like the others. On the larger screen the join at Graham's shoulder looked worse than she remembered.
“Did anyone ask you to make this?”
“No.”
“Did Evan know?”
“Not until after he pushed him.”
“What did Graham say when he arrived?”
Claire repeated not this evening, then admitted she hadn't heard everything he said before he pulled Vivian outside. Lewis asked who had. She wrote down the names without making Claire's inference into a quotation.
“What Graham told Vivian about Sam,” Claire said. “Have you asked him?”
“He's in hospital. We need his own account when he's able to give it. I'm asking what you heard yourself.”
“Vivian telling us. Graham didn't say it in front of me.”
“Then keep those separate.”
Lewis asked for the dealer's details and for copies of the messages about the camera. Claire gave her the failed experiments too, the clock and paper, although they proved nothing useful about Sam. Lewis asked her to preserve the body and all the cards she had kept. She did not ask Claire what tomorrow would look like.
When they finished, Claire had not persuaded her that a camera could see ahead. She had given her a record that included the parts she had made and the part she'd withheld. Lewis left the attachment list on the desk. Claire kept it there.
After Lewis had left, Claire put the used body into the plain box it had arrived in. The dealer's receipt was still at the bottom, describing an ordinary used camera and a price she had once considered fortunate.
She closed the lid. The body remained intact beneath the folded strap.
The files stayed where they were. She preserved the real frames and the false one separately, with the ordinary pieces and messages that explained what she'd done.
Evan came in the afternoon. He stood at the kitchen door, not entering until she moved aside. The gesture hurt because he hadn't needed that pause on Friday.
His knuckles were swollen. She looked once and then at his face.
He said he'd been interviewed under caution last night and released while the inquiries continued.
“They told me he's alive,” he said.
“Vivian told us too.”
“Good.”
He sat at the table. She put water in front of him and waited.
“I had room to stop,” he said.
Claire nodded.
“I told them. I could have let him stand there. I wanted him to go down.”
“I saw.”
“And then I wanted to leave him.”
The admission changed the kitchen more than the bruise had. Claire looked at the clean hands on the table and remembered the moment on the landing, his gaze toward the gate.
“You stayed,” she said.
“I did.”
He drank the water. “That doesn't make the shove another thing.”
“No.”
He looked toward the workroom. “Did you think the fake meant you wouldn't have to tell me?”
“At first I thought it would keep you out of the real one. Then I knew I needed to tell you and kept waiting.”
“Until after.”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes briefly. Claire didn't move toward him.
“I want you,” he said. “I don't know what to do with that today.”
She felt the answer in her throat. “Neither do I.”
“You don't get to make it all right because it was help in the picture.”
“I know.”
He gave a tired, angry smile. “You do know a lot.”
She looked down at her hands and let the silence go on.
After a while he rose. She walked him to the door. They didn't kiss. He said he had work to finish and she said she hoped it went well, a smaller wish than anything she had sent into tomorrow.
When he left, she carried the camera box upstairs and put it on a high shelf in the spare cupboard. She wrote its location beside the body number in the evidence list Lewis had asked her to keep. Then she went back down to send Ruth her photographs. The woman in the blue dress was laughing. Claire let the picture remain good.