He passes the glass front of the store and turns into its doorway.

The bookstore. He loves it. He loves walking through the door. He loves the tables where the fiction and nonfiction books that the staff like best are set out. He loves the deep, comfortable chairs scattered around, and the pleasure of seeing people in them, reading under the floor lamps. He loves the low-ceilinged room upstairs where the art books, the books on photography and travel, are kept. He loves the wooden counter running in front of the big plate-glass windows that look out on Mount Auburn Street, he loves the office in the back with its long single desk where they all sit in a row, facing their computers. He loves the kinds of conversations they have—about writers, about wonderful passages that must be read aloud, about fictional characters. Conversations often broken off midstream by something someone has to do, but always, he feels, important. He loves unboxing the books, pulling them out, looking at the typeface, the cover, the author photo, the acknowledgments.

He waves at Bill behind the counter, then goes to the office to tell Georgie and Emily and Erica he’s here. Georgie passes him a message slip. “A woman,” she says. “She didn’t give her name. She said you’d know.” He pockets it without looking at it. He talks to Emily about the numbers to order from Knopf, he talks to Erica about arrangements for Jamie’s reading.

He goes out to the floor to make himself useful by calling the people whose special orders have come in. In between a couple of these calls, he takes out the message slip Georgie gave him and reads it. “It’s Thursday,” it says, in Georgie’s neat handwriting. She’s put quotes around the words, and there are three question marks on the line where the caller’s name should go.

He makes his next call to Rosemary. When she answers, he says, “I’m not going to make it today.”

“Oh,” she says. “I’ll miss you.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Is it hard to talk right now?”

“It’s always hard at the store.” Though at the moment, everyone out here is busy. He could say whatever he wanted and no one would hear. “But we do need to talk.”

“Good,” she says. “When?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“When?” she says.

“I’ll call you tomorrow. There’s a lot to discuss.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. Then she says, “That sounds ominous.”

He doesn’t know what to say. Finally he offers, “Well, maybe it is. A little.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she says. And after a moment: “Graham?”

“I’ll call tomorrow, “ he says. “We’ll make a time.”

There’s another long silence. “Fine,” she says, and hangs up.

Graham stands there for a few minutes. Outside the window, an elderly man wearing a black beret—a Harvard type, Graham thinks—is talking to a woman his own age. Their polite white heads bob over and over, while the large black dog at the end of the leash the man holds is shitting in the dirt around the tree Graham considers his own. Graham doesn’t move, though. He doesn’t bang on the glass as he might otherwise do. His heart is pounding, but he feels sure now that he can do it, he can end things with Rosemary. He was rude, a bit, though he hadn’t really intended it. Perhaps, yes, unkind. But he had put something in motion. He had said they would talk. Now that would have to happen.

5

Annie’s studio was in Somerville, in an old red-brick industrial building near Union Square, an area full of other old industrial buildings, almost all of them converted into condominiums by now—you could tell which by the curtains or the treelike plants visible inside some of the old steel window frames. The artists in Annie’s building knew the days were numbered until this happened to their building, and Annie had actually begun to look around for another studio. She understood, though, that it would be hard to replace this one, she’d had it for so long and it was so perfect for her. Graham had helped her build it out, making it into a two-room space. Both rooms, the darkroom and the open area, were just the right size—the working area large and light, the darkroom smaller and windowless.

She used the darkroom only occasionally now—almost all of her work was in color and digital at this point, and she paid a lab to have the printing done. Slowly the little space had filled up with boxes and files and camera equipment. She felt almost apologetic every time she opened the door.

In the middle of the larger room she had a big square worktable set up. She moved around it now, getting ready to wrap things, setting out the equipment she’d need—the bubble wrap, the tape, the boxcutter.

The pictures she and Danielle had agreed on were leaning against the walls all around the room. It had been a difficult process, choosing which ones to include. Annie had unthinkingly left up some of the photos she’d taken at the start of the farming article, the ones that still had people in them. When Danielle saw them, she’d assumed they would be among the images they’d hang in the show. She couldn’t believe that Annie didn’t want to use any of them. As a result, the tone between them was strained from the start.

Then Danielle didn’t want several of the pictures that Annie liked best. One the grimy kitchen of a farmhouse, everything embrowned, as Annie thought of it, but with a solitary, pristine bottle of milk set out, a pure, almost overwhelming white against the worn maroon linoleum of the counter. Another, the unoccupied living room of an elderly couple Annie had grown fond of. The television was on, turned to a morning talk show, and the furniture was clustered around it, as though the blurry talking heads were honored guests. The fireplace was visible behind the television—the fireplace that might have been central in some earlier life. Instead it was overflowing with sloppily stacked-up old newspapers and magazines.

“God, these are incredibly depressing,” Danielle said. She preferred the photos of more civilized, orderly interiors. She liked one of Frieda’s bedroom, spare and neat and chaste-looking, the bed carefully made. She found it “Dickinsonian.”

Danielle was hard to argue with, and part of that was how impeccable she was personally. Small—about Annie’s size—delicate, her hair cut just so, in a sort of Louise Brooks bob. She had perfect skin, she wore clothes that were unusual and yet also elegant—Issey Miyake kind of clothes. Clothes that reeked of money. You couldn’t stand in front of her in blue jeans and insist on anything. “Really?” she’d say. It was never a question.

“Really?” she’d said to another shot Annie liked—a picture she’d taken of her own empty bed, the sheets tangled after she and Graham had made love, books scattered on the floor on either side of it. “A little too cluttered for me. And we’ve seen this kind of thing before, don’t you think?”

Well, Annie knew what she meant, but she had thought of the image as an evocation of the intimate, sexual heart of a marriage. She had wanted it to be the first thing people saw at the show.

They’d agreed on several other shots of farmhouse interiors, tidier, cleaner, but in their own way just as arresting—maybe even disturbing. One had dozens of gnomelike figures set everywhere, as though they were observing or supervising the life of the absent inhabitants—or taking over, which was how Annie liked to think of it. Another was of a kitchen saturated with color and busy with pattern, every shelf covered with flowered paper, the walls with cheerful or kitschy mottoes. The chairs at the table were cushioned in gingham, and hanging on the wall over all of this was the picture of a gorgeous, Aryan Jesus Christ, looking down with forgiving pale-blue eyes while he held open the bosom of his white robe to reveal, through a tidy opening, his valentine-shaped heart, a vibrant orange-red. After they’d agreed on several more like these, Danielle had yielded to Annie on three or four of her favorites.

Once she’d finished wrapping the framed photographs, it took Annie a long time to load the car—one picture at a time, up and down the three dark flights of sloping stairs over and over, once nearly tripping on one of the loose aluminum strips nailed along the outer edge of each step. When she turned to shut her studio door for the last time, carrying the last photograph, she was startled at how barren the room looked, how emptied out.

It was after two by now, and she was tired and hungry. She drove to the South End, and then through its streets of bow-fronted brick town houses, most of them renovated—the outward signs of that being the polished brass of the door hardware, the fresh black of the wrought-iron fences and ornate railings, the chic plantings in the tiny front yards.