In the morning she thought, for perhaps half a minute, that she had dreamed the photograph.
The feeling lasted until she saw her shoes outside the bedroom door. She had brought them upstairs, after all. One lay on its side, exposing the place where the lining had split. She remembered picking it up in the workroom, still looking back at the dark screen.
It had happened. A file had been there. That was all.
Downstairs, the sun filled the client room with the gentle, expensive light she had never managed to arrange when anyone was actually paying her. She opened the window and found the bag with the peach. There was a good side and a bad side. She ate the good side standing over the sink, then made toast.
Before she let herself look at the strange image, she sent Vivian the preview.
It took longer than it should have to write the message. Thank you for such a beautiful day felt slightly false, but she had sent it to couples whose weddings had involved shouting, a minor kitchen fire, an uncle leaving in handcuffs. It referred to the beautiful parts. Those were there.
She wrote, Here are a few of my favorites from yesterday. More soon. The red skirt deserved its own wedding.
Vivian answered almost immediately.
It might have had a better time.
A second message followed: They're lovely. Thank you, Claire. Truly.
Claire smiled before she remembered to be worried.
She could ask now. Vivian was awake, holding a phone, being the woman who had made hungry flowers. Claire began typing Did you—then closed the conversation. It was morning, which ought to have made the question easier. Instead it made the idea of having it seem ridiculous.
She opened the image on the computer.
The file hadn't changed. The sun on the wall, the pale trousers, the man beyond Vivian's shoulder. The timestamp was no longer tomorrow. It was today, early afternoon.
Perhaps Vivian had been at the venue before the wedding, dressed casually, and Claire's new body had somehow contained another photographer's picture. Perhaps that was possible. Perhaps she could call the dealer on Monday and ask without having to say all of it. She did not take the body out and check its clock. She didn't want to touch it, and she was irritated by that too.
At eleven Beth let herself in through the kitchen door.
“You're dressed,” she said, as though Claire had accomplished something unlikely.
“So are you.”
Beth wore the green jacket. It was shorter on one side, intentionally, and lined in a pink that showed when she reached for the kettle. On the table, as a photograph, it had looked like an argument. On Beth it looked settled.
“Turn round.”
Beth made a full revolution, finishing with a small bow. “I was going to say you can't afford me, but I actually hope you can.”
“It looks good.”
“Better than good.”
“Very good.”
“You're a marketing disaster.”
Claire touched the back seam. Beth had changed the shape enough to make the jacket hers without making it impractical. Their mother would have found something admiring to say before mentioning the uneven hem. Claire was trying to get there.
“It makes me want to stand up straighter,” she said.
“There. That's useful.”
Beth turned away to fill the kettle. She had brought bread in a paper bag and a small container of butter from her flat because Claire's butter was apparently old enough to vote. She cut four slices, leaving the heels, then stopped and cut a heel for herself.
“How was it?”
“The wedding?”
“No, your recreational eleven hours on your feet.”
Claire told her about the mother of the groom's closed eyes. Beth laughed and said the woman had come into the dressing room twice to announce that Vivian wasn't eating enough. On the second visit she had brought half a banana wrapped in a napkin.
“Was Vivian all right?” Claire asked.
Beth slid a plate across the table. “Getting married usually involves several kinds of all right.”
“You know what I mean.”
“She was nervous.”
“About him?”
Beth looked up. Claire wished she had stopped with the mother and the banana.
“About getting married. About everyone looking at her. She'd slept badly. Why?”
“She seemed a little distracted.”
“You were pointing a camera at her all day. People start thinking about their noses.”
Beth bit into her toast, then reached across and rubbed a thumb along the edge of Claire's plate, gathering a smear of butter. It was a childhood habit, stealing a little of whatever was nearest, and Claire felt a sharp fondness for her. She could tell Beth anything. Beth would make fun of her for a minute and then listen. She had done that the winter Claire became convinced a noise under the floorboards was a leaking pipe and it turned out to be a neighbor's cat pushing an abandoned toy against the wall.
The cat had been real. The picture was real. The thing she needed to say was not.
“I got some lovely ones of her skirt,” Claire said.
Beth brightened. “Show me.”
They went into the workroom together. Claire opened the six selected images, keeping the rest out of sight. Beth leaned on the back of her chair. She smelled of the lavender soap their mother had used, though she insisted it was a different brand and she had bought it because it was cheap.
“That one,” Beth said at the terrace doors. “She'll love that.”
“She does.”
Beth studied Graham's hand on Vivian's waist. “You can make anyone look like they know what they're doing.”
“She does know.”
“I meant getting married.”
“Oh. No one knows.”
“Good. I'd hate to be missing a course.”
She stayed half an hour, drinking tea and showing Claire a drawing for the studio sign. Her name was larger than the word alterations. Claire suggested putting bridal work beneath it. Beth said there was already a bridal shop in town and she wanted women to come in who weren't planning to marry anyone.
“You could put occasion wear,” Claire said.
“Every day is an occasion if your trousers fit badly.”
She left to meet Maris about a shelf. Claire stood in the kitchen after the door closed, listening to the jacket's footsteps fade along the path.
She had almost told her. Almost was a comfortable little word. It let a person claim the shape of an action without any of its inconvenience.
Claire washed the plates.
By early afternoon, she had filled a basket with laundry and moved it to the bottom of the stairs. The image time passed while she was hanging a shirt across the drying rack in the back room. She noticed because she kept looking at the kitchen clock. Nothing happened in the house. A lorry rattled past. Someone outside called a child's name three times, increasingly cross. Her phone offered a reminder that the electricity payment would come out on Tuesday.
She took the laundry upstairs, then brought it down again because the rack was downstairs.
At four she went out for milk.
The corner shop was quiet. The boy behind the counter was eating crisps from a bag he kept below the register, as though this concealed the sound of chewing. Claire bought milk, eggs, and biscuits she hadn't meant to buy. When she came out, two women were talking beside the newsstand.
“At the Alder Rooms,” one said.
Claire stopped to rearrange the bag on her wrist.
“They found him this afternoon. My brother was there with the grounds people.”
“Wasn't there a wedding?”
“Yesterday. It's not to do with that.”
The woman sounded certain. Claire wanted her certainty. She wanted to carry it home with the milk.
She walked past them slowly, waiting for another sentence, but they had moved on to someone who owed one of them money. She didn't ask. She could still have been mistaken about what they meant.
At home she set the bag on the table without putting anything away and looked up the Alder Rooms.
The local news page had a short report, recently posted. A man had been found dead in a disused loading recess off the service road by a maintenance worker earlier that afternoon. The venue was closed on Sundays; the worker had come to investigate an alarm in an empty storeroom. The police were making inquiries. His name was Sam Hart. He was thirty.
There was a photograph of the service entrance, taken from outside a cordoned area. A delivery door, then the old loading recess to one side, with the shrub and low stone edge. The place where he had lain was empty in this picture. Claire looked from one edge of the image to the other, not because the place was difficult to recognize but because it was too easy.
Below the report, someone had shared a photograph of Sam standing beside a river boat. Blue shirt. Dark hair clipped short at the sides, a nose that had been broken or simply grown crooked, one eyebrow raised at the person taking the picture. An arm flung around a friend whose face had been cut off by the edge.
Claire went into the workroom.
She opened the service-road file and looked at the man's face, turned sideways into the grass. His shirt, the line of his hair, that nose in partial profile. She did not need to invent a detail or find a face where there wasn't one.
Sam Hart.
Yesterday she had looked at a picture of him lying beyond that shrub and stone edge, in the recess where today he had been found dead.
She held the edge of the desk. She was standing, although she didn't remember getting up from the chair. For a moment she thought she might be sick, and what frightened her most was the practical problem of where to do it. The bin was full of discarded packaging. The kitchen felt a long way away.
She sat down on the floor.
From there she could see the underside of the desk, the cords bundled badly, the little tag she'd made to distinguish two plugs and never needed again. The machine was still making its soft noise. The image still existed above her.
It had not told her he would die. She held on to that. It had shown a man lying down. She hadn't known his name. She hadn't known what day anything had happened, except for a line of information she could have changed herself.
But she had known something was wrong.
Her phone lay on the desk. She reached up for it without standing. There was Beth's name near the top of her recent messages. Vivian's beneath it. She could call the local police number from the report. She could send the file and let someone else decide what it was.
They would ask why she had waited.
They would ask where she had been standing, when she had been there, whether she had spoken to the woman, whether the man was alive. They would want answers from a professional witness, a woman who made her living looking. The only answer she had would sound like an excuse she had assembled after reading the news.
She thought of her sample albums on the shelf, the house payment, next Saturday's clients. She thought of Vivian opening the preview that morning, saying thank you. She thought of Beth leaning over her shoulder while the other photograph waited in the same machine.
Claire locked her phone.
She sat on the floor until the milk began to worry her. Then she went to the kitchen and put it away.
That evening Beth sent a photograph of the new shelf, empty except for a pink bowl of pins.
Claire replied, Looks lovely.
She didn't tell her anything else.