She opened the box in her car in the parking garage on Milwaukee Street. There were six prints, matted in cream. In five of them the three of them looked the way families look in studio portraits: arranged, pleasant, slightly stiff, Emma's smile a fraction too wide, Adam's hand proprietary on her shoulder. They were lovely. Adam's mother would be satisfied.
The sixth was the last frame Calvin had taken before he lowered the camera. Natalie had not known he had printed it. In it, Adam and Emma were still smiling at the lens. But Natalie was not. She was looking past the camera, at the man behind it, and her face was open in a way she had not seen it in years, in any photograph, in any mirror: startled, stripped, afraid, and underneath the fear, unmistakably, something like relief. It was the face of a woman who has heard her real name called in a crowded room.
She sat in the car and looked at it for a long time.
* * *
Claire did not call for sixteen days.
Natalie went to work. She sat on small chairs in small rooms with six-year-olds who could not yet say their r's and held up picture cards of rabbits and rainbows and rockets, and she was patient and warm and good at it, and every time her phone buzzed in her pocket, her heart stopped. Adam went to work. He came home and cooked dinner and asked Emma about school and was courteous to Natalie in a way that was worse, in some respects, than anger would have been. He slept in their bed again, but on the far edge of it, with his back to her. Once, at two in the morning, she woke and found that he had turned over in his sleep and his hand was resting on her hip, and she lay perfectly still until dawn so as not to wake him and make him move it.