"I couldn't be held about it," she said. "Not by you. Not by anybody. If you'd held me, I would have had to feel it. And if I'd felt it, I don't think I would have gotten up again."
The back room door opened. Calvin Mercer came out alone and closed it behind him. He had his glasses on again. He looked at the two of them standing in front of the monitor, at Natalie's face and Adam's, and he did not ask what had been said. He went to the front of the studio and turned the sign on the glass door from OPEN to CLOSED and turned the lock. Then he walked to the wall and switched off the softboxes, one and then the other, and the room fell into ordinary lamplight, brown and gold, and seemed suddenly much smaller.
"She's looking at a Kodak Brownie," he said. "I told her she could take some pictures of the back room with my phone. She's all right. She's worried about you."
"Why did you do that?" Adam said. He turned on the photographer, and Natalie saw that he needed somewhere to put what he was feeling, and that Calvin Mercer was the nearest available surface. "Why would you pull that up? In front of my kid? What business is it of yours?"
Calvin did not flinch. He looked at Adam for a long moment.
"That's a fair question," he said. "I'll answer it. But I think your wife ought to say her part first, if she wants to. It's hers to say."
He pulled a chair out from the reception desk and set it near the bench, then another, then a third, and sat down on the third one himself, a little apart, with his hands folded between his knees, like a man at a bus stop who is prepared to wait for as long as it takes.