The photographer raised his head. He did not look at Natalie. He looked past her, at her husband, steadily, as if he were weighing what one man owed another.
"Do you want to know who she was standing beside?"
* * *
For a long moment nobody answered, and in that moment Natalie understood that the evening had already split into a before and an after, and that she was standing on the seam.
She knew the photograph. She did not need to see the screen. She could have drawn it from memory on the back of a receipt: the gray mottled backdrop, which this studio no longer used; the girl of twenty in a borrowed blue sweater, holding a white bundle against her chest; the two people on either side of her, close, but not touching her, as if she were something that might break. She knew where every hand had been. She knew that the girl was not looking at the camera but down, at the bundle, and that the photographer, a younger man then, with no gray in his hair, had said very gently, Whenever you're ready, and she had never been ready, and he had taken the picture anyway, because there had been no other way.
"Adam," she said. "Don't."
Adam turned to her. "Don't what? Natalie, what is this?"