“No, I do like the company.”

“Well, I’m glad then. Glad I asked.” He was still holding the poker he’d used earlier to push the paper under the kindling. Now he leaned forward and nudged one of the logs back with it. “You seemed . . . lonely. You seemed new, in any case. I suppose I feel like the old hand.”

“A welcoming committee of one,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

A silence accrued again. She was more comfortable in it. Still, she was the one who broke it. “What are you writing about?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s not interesting to describe it.”

“I’m interested, though.”

He waited a moment, and then he said, “A marriage.”

“That could be anything. It could be . . . Henry James. It could be Updike.”

So he explained it to her. An older man. A younger woman—a divorcée, with a little boy. He knows almost right away that the marriage is a mistake for him, but he has come to love the boy, so he does nothing about it. The woman understands this finally, and is wildly angry. “She starts to lead her life more and more away from him, away from the child. And finally she leaves, but she leaves the child with him.”

Annie was thinking of Lucas, the little boy she loved. The boy who already had a mother.

“Is it a happy ending, then?”

“I suppose you could call it that, if you felt it was.”

“But do you?”

He shrugged.

“Ah, you’re impossible.” She laughed.

“Well, you asked what it was about, and I told you. I told you, basically, the plot. But I don’t want to tell you what I think it’s most deeply about, or what you’re supposed to think about what it’s about. That’s something I can’t control anyway.”

She said, “It’s about Isaac and Ruby.”

“That’s it. The boy and the girl. Same old, same old.” They were quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Now you have to tell me what your work is about.”

“Ah! It’s even harder for a photographer, saying what it’s about. What you see is what you get.”

“And what would I see?”

Annie had just started to work from the negatives of the images she’d taken of her mother then, most of them of her face. She was, as she put it now to Ian, going to fool around with what she wanted from these shots. “Then I’ll know what they’re about.”

Annie had been angry with Graham when she left for MacDowell. It was at a time in her life when she wanted to move to New York. What she said to Graham was that she thought it would help her professionally, she thought it would be a more sympathetic place for a person like her. And she was tired, she said, of Cambridge.

This was before they bought the house, before she had Sarah. And it was after her first show did so well, when she had thought that this meant that all the shows would do well—all the future shows—and that her life would change as a result, she would belong in New York. She said this to Graham. “I think New York would be a much better place for me. For my work.”

But her tone when she spoke was deliberately careless—so careless that Graham must have thought it was just a kind of daydream she was talking about, a sort of joke.

“Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” he said. Then he laughed.

Annie’s plan had been to ask him to consider her idea while she was away at MacDowell, and his response felt like being slapped—so that by the time he understood how serious she’d been, the damage was done. She had turned away from him, wounded and furious. When he offered his real objections, having to do with Lucas, with Frieda, having to do with the bookstore, having to do with the impossibility of starting up all over again in Manhattan, she was unable to summon any sympathy for his point of view. He seemed to her, suddenly, small-minded. Everything he did, his pleasure in everything he did, was offensive to her. Unbearable. Only later did it occur to her that her proposal to him, taken seriously, would have felt like a dismissal of his whole life and what he’d made of it.

At the moment, though, she wasn’t capable of thinking about how she had sounded. She felt, listening to him, that she was hearing doors shutting, that she was understanding, for the first time, how confined his life was. Confined by the small size of his ambition, and by his actual enjoyment of all of his familiar, repetitive routines.

And that meant that her life was confined too. The fears she’d overcome to be with him, the fears of being eaten by him, absorbed by him, by his appetites, seemed suddenly confirmed.

“Annie,” he said, his voice serious now. “We settled on this, long ago.”

“We settled for this,” she said.

There was a moment of silence between them. They were looking at each other, hard.

“You know there’s such a thing as money, right?” he said, finally. “There’s no way we could even begin to swing it.”

They had a chilly month and a half, and then Annie went off alone to MacDowell.

After that first glass of wine in his studio, Annie and Ian began to seek each other out. It started a few days later when Ian asked her at breakfast if he could hitch a ride with her to town, to Peterborough. He didn’t have a car here, and he needed a few groceries for his studio. To make it worth her while, he’d buy her coffee. Or a drink. Whatever she liked. So they went into town together and walked around, looking at shop windows, looking at houses and gardens, and then they sat and had coffee at a lunch place.

Ian had a slow way of talking. He seemed to her at first quiet, almost inexpressive, accustomed as she was to Graham’s exuberant assertiveness.

What was the affinity, then? There was one, and they both felt it, it seemed. After that first afternoon together, they often sat next to each other at dinner. They fell into the habit of walking back to their studios together after breakfast. Occasionally they met in the afternoons and walked around the grounds, or took long drives in Annie’s van, weaving through small towns in northern Massachusetts or western New Hampshire. Sometimes they listened to music together in the building called the library.

They touched each other carefully, Annie’s hand on his arm, on his shoulder, calling attention to something she wanted him to see. His arm across her shoulder, guiding her across a street, or into a bar. It felt a bit like high school, she thought. But thrilling, in that same way.

There were several parties while she was there, parties in other people’s studios. They danced together a few times at these parties, and she was intensely aware of his body, so slender and muscled against her, his hands on her back so strong, so in control of how they moved.

She recognized that something was happening between them. That she wanted something to happen. And didn’t, too. But she allowed herself to have fantasies about it—about an escape from her life with Graham. About an affair. She told herself this was all right, because she wasn’t going to do anything about it. It was just a way of adjusting the balance between them, between her and Graham.

Though she didn’t think of it then, she realized later that it was a kind of revenge she was exacting. A private revenge. One Graham didn’t need to know about.

Late in the afternoon four or five days before she was to leave, she was startled by a knocking on her studio door. When she opened it, Ian was standing there in the cool, damp air under the little roof that protected the doorway. Behind him, droplets from the eaves fell, a kind of silvery scrim. All around was the rustle of light rain landing on the carpet of bright leaves that covered the ground everywhere.

“Oh, no,” she said, already shaking her head. “No, no, no, no, no. You’re not here. You’re can’t be here.” This was the rule of the colony. No one arrived at anyone else’s workplace without a specific invitation.

“On the other hand, I am here.”

He waited for a moment, as if for her answer. When it didn’t come, he said, “I think you know why.”

Annie looked away, as if she were ashamed. “I do,” she said. Then back at him. “But . . . I just can’t.” She shook her head. “This is not something I can do.”

“Just let me in,” he said. “We can talk about it.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We can talk about something else, then. Anything you like.”

So she let him in. For a while, they did talk. He sat slouched in the only chair in the room, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She was propped up against the pillows on the daybed she’d napped on sometimes in the afternoons. Photos she’d developed of her mother’s face were everywhere on the walls, looking blankly down at them.