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Part 1
He shook her hand with the wrong one, and the ring was cold.
A plain gold band on the left hand of a man who had no one left to wear it for. It sat loose. He hadn’t had it resized.
“Nadia,” he said, over her shoulder, and let go before she’d finished.
“Dad.” She kissed his cheek and went past him into the house, already filling the kettle, and Samantha stood on the step with her bag on her shoulder and her heart doing something complicated, because she had not come for portfolio photos, whatever she’d said on the phone, and everyone in the hall probably knew it.
“Come in, then,” he said, and stood aside.
The hall smelled of coffee and old paper. He was fifty-something and he looked at her for about a second and a half and then at the light in the hall, and she noticed, because she was used to a different order of events.
“The back room’s better. It was my wife’s study.” He didn’t slow down on the word. “Desk, chair, wall of books. Only room in the house that doesn’t look like a man gave up.”
Nadia was at the kitchen door with her keys already out. “Shop before it shuts. Back in ten.” Then, over her shoulder, not unkindly, the way you tell someone something for their own good: “Don’t get ideas, Sam. Everyone knows he’s giving the part to Megan.”
The front door clicked. The latch went. The house settled into a quiet with a clock in it.
Ten minutes.
The study had a wall of books, a desk with a green blotter, and on the shelf at eye height a photograph of a woman with Nadia’s jaw, laughing at something outside the frame. Gerard moved a lamp and did not look at the photograph and did not mention it.
“Sit. Feet flat. Don’t pose.”
She sat. The bed was low and the cover was old and she put her hands in her lap and he lifted the camera and then lowered it again.
“You’re doing something with your left shoulder.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re apologising for the height. It drops, your chin comes down, you make yourself smaller.” He came around the lamp. “You’re five-nine in a town where everyone’s five-four. Stop it.”
She’d been photographed by men who told her she was beautiful and men who told her to arch her back, and not one of them had ever told her she was doing something wrong with a shoulder. Something in her chest sat up and put its elbows on the table.
“Show me,” she said.
He stopped. Considered her the way he’d considered the lamp. Then two fingers, the flat of them, under the point of her shoulder, lifting it a centimetre, and his thumb came to rest in the seam of her collarbone and stayed a beat too long before he took it back.
“Like that. Hold it.”
The shutter went. Twice. It was harder than it looked.
“Better,” he said. “You’ve got a good face when you’re not managing it.”
“Nobody’s ever said that.”
“Nobody’s ever looked.”
She held the shoulder and did the arithmetic she’d been doing since Tuesday, when Nadia had let the rumor slip over chips. The Hollow Lane picture. Gerard’s picture. His studio, his call, his name above the director’s. Megan had the callback Thursday. Megan was twenty-four and had a jaw like a drawer front and had been in two things and was, by every account, perfectly fine. And the part was not signed. She’d checked that twice with two different people, because Samantha Nixon had spent eight years in Barewood being patient and pleasant and third choice, and she had lost a part in March to a girl who couldn’t hold her shoulder up for four seconds, and she was done being polite about what she wanted.
“Is it true?” she said. “About Megan.”
“Who told you that?”
“Nadia.”
He adjusted the reflector. “It’s true.”
“Has she signed?”
“She’s got a callback Thursday. It’s not signed.” He straightened and looked at her properly. “It’s hers to lose.”
Hers to lose. So today was the last day it could move. Ten minutes, a dead wife’s study, and a man with a camera who hadn’t looked at her the way other men looked at her — and if she was going to do anything at all, it was now, without a plan, and it was going to have to be good.
She stood up and pulled her top over her head.
He looked at her. Then at the light. Then at her again, briefly, and said: “I didn’t ask for that.”
“You were going to get there eventually.”
The fishnet was a full body and the bra under it was fishnet too and did approximately nothing. He stepped in and turned her by the hip and got his hand flat on her arse to square her to the light, and it was warm and certain and it was gone in three seconds.
“Skirt down an inch. It’s riding.”
She did it. He crouched, and the crouch put his face at her hip, and she could hear him breathing and it was not a remarkable sound and it undid her anyway.
“You’ve got a ladder in the fishnet. Left thigh.” His thumb found it, smoothed the tear flat against her skin, and stayed. “It’s fine. It reads as real.”
He stood and turned her again and adjusted the strap at her shoulder, and his knuckles crossed the top of her breast on the way, and he did not do it twice.
She thought: nothing. That was nothing.
Then he did it again, deliberately, the back of two fingers, and watched her face while he did.
“Is this part of it?” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she deserved.
“Part of what?”
“The favour.”
“Ask me about Megan again,” he said, and put his whole hand over her breast, and held it there, thumb idle, like a man checking a light reading.
“Ask me while I’m doing this.”
She did not move his hand. That was the decision, right there, and they both knew it, and her heart was going like a bird in a box.
“Thursday,” she said. “Is it fixed?”
“Nothing’s fixed until someone signs.”
“Gerard.”
“Mm.”
“I could do something for you.” Then she lost the thread, because she’d planned to say it well and it was coming out sideways. “I know you don’t need anything. But I’m good at it. At this. And I want the part, and I know what I’m offering isn’t the part, it’s — ” she stopped, started again. “I’d rather you remembered me on Thursday.”
“That’s not a sentence.”
“It’s a proposal.”
He lowered the camera. He did not move toward her, which she realised after a second was the entire point — he was making her stand in it.
“You’ve got the photos either way,” he said.
“I know.”
“Say it properly, then. What are you offering?”
She got the fishnet off her shoulders and pushed it down and stepped out of it, and then the knickers, and stood in front of him with her arms loose and her chin up, because if she was going to do this she was not going to apologise for the height.
The ring was the only bright thing in the room.
He looked at her for a long time. Longer than was useful. Long enough that she thought, with a small cold drop in her stomach, that she might have read the whole afternoon wrong. Then he crossed the room and put his hand at her breast — not a grope, an appraisal, the way he’d looked at the shoulder — and she held still for it and hated how much she wanted him to keep it there.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “She’ll be back in four.”
“I know.”
She got down. The carpet was rough at her knees and her knees complained immediately and she didn’t care.
His hand came down over both of hers on his belt and stopped her.
“You know about Megan,” he said.
“I know about Megan.”
“So what’s this for?”
