The Age of Light

by Whitney Scharer

Genres: Biographical; Historical Fiction; World War II

Synopsis

Model. Muse. Lover. Artist.

‘I’d rather take a picture than be one,’ Lee Miller declares, as she arrives in Paris one cool day in 1929. Lee has left behind her life in New York and a successful modelling career at Vogue to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer. She soon catches the eye of renowned Surrealist artist Man Ray and convinces him to hire her as his assistant. Man is an egotistical, charismatic force, and as Lee becomes both his muse and his protégé, they embark upon a passionate affair.

Lee and Man spend their days working closely in the studio and their nights at smoky cabarets, opium dens and wild parties. But as Lee begins to assert herself, and to create pioneering work of her own, Man’s jealousy spirals out of control, and leads to a betrayal that threatens to destroy them both . . .

Transporting us from bohemian Paris to the battlefields of WWII, The Age of Light is a powerful and intoxicating story about love, obsession and the personal price of ambition. In her immersive debut novel, Whitney Scharer brings a brilliant and revolutionary artist out of the shadow of a man’s legacy, and into the light.

Release date: February 5, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 385

Sample

Chapter One​

Paris
1929

The night Lee meets Man Ray begins in a half-empty bistro a few blocks from Lee’s hotel, where she sits alone, eating steak and scalloped potatoes and drinking half pitchers of dusky red wine. She is twenty-two, and beautiful. The steak tastes even better than she thought it would, swimming in a rich brown roux that pools on the plate and seeps into the layers of sliced potatoes and thick melted slabs of Gruyère.

Lee has passed the bistro many times since she arrived in Paris three months earlier, but—her finances being what they are—this is the first time she has ventured inside. Dining alone is nothing new: Lee has spent almost all her time alone since she got here, a hard adjustment after her busy life in New York City, where she modeled for Vogue and hit up the jazz clubs almost nightly, always with a different man on her arm. Back then, Lee took it for granted that everyone she met would be entranced by her: her father, Condé Nast, Edward Steichen, all the powerful men she had charmed over the years. Those men. She may have captivated them, but they took things from her—raked her over with their eyes, barked commands at her from under camera hoods, reduced her to pieces of a girl: a neck to hold pearls, a slim waist to show off a belt, a hand to bring to her lips and blow them kisses. Their gaze made her into someone she didn’t want to be. Lee might miss the parties, but she does not miss modeling, and in fact she would rather go hungry than go back to her former line of work.

Here in Paris, where she has come to start over, to make art instead of being made into it, no one pays much attention to Lee’s beauty. When she walks through Montparnasse, her new neighborhood, no one catches her eye, no one turns around to watch her pass. Instead, Lee seems to be just another pretty detail in a city where almost everything is artfully arranged. A city built on the concept of form over function, where rows of jewel-toned petits fours gleam in a patisserie’s window, too flawless to eat. Where a milliner displays exquisitely elaborate hats, with no clear indication of how one would wear them. Even the Parisian women at the sidewalk cafés are like sculptures, effortlessly elegant, leaning back in their chairs as if their raison d’être is decoration. She tells herself she is glad not to be noticed, to blend in with her surroundings, but still, after three months in this city, Lee secretly thinks she has not seen anyone more beautiful than she is.

  

When Lee has finished the steak and sopped up the last of the gravy with her bread, she stretches and sits back in her chair. It is early. The restaurant is quiet, the only other diners elderly Parisians, their voices too low for eavesdropping. Empty wine pitchers are lined up neatly next to Lee’s plate, and on the far end of the table is her camera, which she has taken to carrying everywhere despite its heaviness and bulk. Just before she boarded the steamer to Le Havre, her father pushed the camera into her hands, an old Graflex he no longer used, and even though Lee told him she didn’t want it, he insisted. She still barely knows how to operate it—her training is in figure drawing, and when she moved to Paris she planned to become a painter, envisioned herself dabbing meditatively at a canvas en plein air, not mucking about with chemicals in a suffocating darkroom. Still, Lee has learned a bit about taking pictures from him and at Vogue, and there’s something comforting about the camera: both a connection to her past and something a real artist might carry around.

The waiter stops by and takes her empty plate, then asks if she’d like another pitcher of wine. Lee hesitates, picturing the dwindling francs in her little handbag, then says yes. Even though her savings are getting low, she wants a reason to stay a little longer, to be surrounded by people even if she is not with them, to not go back to her hotel room, where the windows are painted shut and the trapped air always smells oppressively of pot roast. Lately she’s been spending more and more time there, drawing in her sketchbook, writing letters, or taking long afternoon naps that leave her unreplenished—anything to pass the time and make her forget how lonely she feels. Lee has never been very good at being by herself: left to her own devices, she can easily sink into sadness and inactivity. As the weeks have passed, her loneliness has gained heft and power: it has contours now, almost a physical shape, and she imagines it sitting in the corner of her room, waiting for her, a sucking, spongy thing.

After he has picked up her plate, the waiter lingers. He is young, with a hint of mustache above his lip so faint it could have been penciled there, and Lee can tell he is intrigued by her.

“Are you a photographer?” he finally asks, the word almost the same in French as in English, photographe, but he mumbles, and Lee’s grasp of the language is still so rusty it takes her a moment to parse his question. When she doesn’t respond, he tips his head at the camera.

“Oh, no, not really,” Lee says. He looks disappointed, and she almost wishes she said yes. Since she’s been here, Lee has taken a few pictures, but they have been shots any tourist would attempt: baguettes in a bicycle basket, lovers pausing to kiss on the Pont des Arts. Her initial tries did not go well. The first time, when she got the prints back from the little camera shop around the corner, they were entirely black; Lee had somehow exposed the plates to light before they were developed. The second set—made with more care, the plates inserted into the camera gingerly, a light sweat dotting her upper lip—came back as murky gray masses, so blurry they could have been clouds or cobblestones, but certainly not close-ups of the sculptures in the park she had been shooting. Her third set of prints, though, was actually in focus, and looking at those small black-and-white images, conjured not only from her mind but from a unique combination of light and time, Lee filled with an excitement she never felt when painting. She had released the shutter, and where nothing had existed, suddenly there was art.

Lee wants the waiter to ask her more questions—wants, so badly, to have an actual conversation, to make a friend—but just then the bell over the door chimes as a group of older men come in and the waiter goes over to show them to a table.

Lee sips her drink as slowly as she can to make it last. As the room gets more crowded, it occurs to her that the bistro is stodgy. All the patrons are years older than her. The men have thick gray mustaches like suit brushes above their lips; the women, while chic, have high buttoned collars and sensible shoes. But then a trio comes in: two men and a woman. At first Lee thinks they are actors because their outfits are so strange. The men wear gauchos and sashes tied at their waists, with white shirts and no jackets. They look almost like parodies of artists but they sit perfectly at ease and the waiter hardly glances at them when they order. The woman, too, is dressed strangely, in the Scheherazade style that was popular a few years back. Her hair is closely bobbed and gleams like polished walnut against her small head, and her lips are painted such a dark red they are almost the same shade as her hair.

Lee tries to listen to them without their noticing. They speak English with a hard northern bite to it, and though normally she wants nothing more than to put Poughkeepsie behind her, on this night the familiar tones of her hometown have the pleasure of sinking into a warm bath. They are talking about a man named Diaghilev, who is the head of the ballet and has diabetes and lives alone in a nearby hotel. The woman seems afraid of him, but Lee can’t discern why; she clearly isn’t a dancer—even seated it is obvious she is stocky, and her ankles look like saucisson stuffed into her T-strap shoes.

“If you’re going to listen, you should join us,” one of the men says, staring at the ceiling.

Lee sips her wine.

“Hey, Lorelei,” he says, swiveling in his chair and snapping his fingers at Lee. “If you’re going to listen to us, you better join us.”

When she realizes he is addressing her, Lee is so surprised she is almost tempted to decline their invitation, but this is the thing she has longed for—a way to be a part of a world just beyond her reach. For a moment she is scared to let it happen. But her waiter has overheard them, and comes over to carry her drink for her, so the choice is made and she moves over to their table.

Once she is settled, the man who invited her leans toward her. “I’m Jimmy,” he says, “and this is Antonio, and this is my sister, Poppy.”

He holds on to the word sister for a beat too long. Lee knows she is to understand that Poppy isn’t his sister, but she has no idea why he would say she is.

Poppy turns her shiny head and looks at Lee. “We were talking about Diaghilev, but I’m bored of that. I want to talk about a scandal. Do you know any scandals?” Poppy purses her lips and a line appears near her mouth like a delicate question mark.

Lee glances around, suddenly hot from all the wine and food. What does she have to say that would interest them? Her mind goes blank as paper, and the only things she can think of are the physical objects around them: the ceiling light swaying on its chain, the scuffed wood floor, the candle on the table with its small waterfall of wax.

“You’re a scandal,” Jimmy says to Poppy, reaching over and putting his hand on her knee. She ignores him, holding Lee’s gaze, the challenge of her question continuing until at last she looks away and it is over. She turns back to Jimmy and he begins talking again, and just like that the tension eases and Lee is folded into their group.

“We were at the Ballets Russes,” Jimmy offers.

“We had to leave,” Poppy says. Lee wonders if they were kicked out because of how they were dressed.

Jimmy balances on the back two legs of his chair. “Poppy here has a very refined sensibility. She can’t bear to see anyone suffer. The director has a reputation—a temper, let’s say—”

Poppy cuts him off. “The dancer looked puffy. She’d been crying, I could tell. And Goncharova’s set was all wrong.”

“I liked it. I better have, all the time I spent helping her paint it.” These are the first words Antonio has spoken. He doesn’t take his cigarette out of his mouth.

Lee turns to him. “Oh, you paint!”

“No.” Antonio takes a huge drag and then crushes his cigarette in the ashtray and lights another in a unified and graceful motion.

“Antonio does automatic drawings,” Jimmy says, and Lee nods as though she knows what he means. Antonio just sits there, so Jimmy continues. “Incredible work. He really gets to the dream state. Time like gears unhinged. Screwy stuff.”

“The opposite of you,” Poppy says, looking at Lee again, and for a moment Lee is shocked, until she realizes that Poppy is pointing to her camera, which she has set on the table and is surprised to find is doing what she hoped it would do: signal her new identity. Lee reaches out and runs her fingers across its case, still cold to the touch in the warm room.

“I’ve been doing illustration work for Vogue,” Lee says, eager to offer up something that might seem intriguing. “They hired me when I moved here to sketch copies of the fashions at the Louvre.”

It is true, or was: for weeks Lee sat on her little folding stool in the Louvre’s east wing, copying the Renaissance objects they had on display. A lace cuff with a rose point pattern, a belt with a giant silver buckle. She sent her sketches to the magazine, care of Condé Nast, but when she did he told her that they couldn’t use them after all. We have a man in Rome now taking pictures, he wrote. Much faster, and such a good way to see all the details. Lee hasn’t been back to the museum since, and she hasn’t found a new job either.

“Fashion at the Louvre,” Jimmy drawls. “How bourgeois.”

Lee flushes, but before she can say anything, Antonio says, “Good light. I work there now and then.”

Lee thinks of the slanting shadows cast down from a bank of the museum’s windows, the silhouettes the statues threw onto the ground. “Yes,” she says, and when she catches Antonio’s eye he gives her a smile, warm and genuine. Jimmy twirls a finger in the air to call for more drinks, and Poppy shifts in her seat so that she’s facing Lee and starts to tell her a long, convoluted story about her childhood in Ohio, and just like that, Lee feels she has lifted a chisel to the wall of Paris and tapped the first crack into its surface.

  

Later. More wine. Poppy’s hand snakes along Jimmy’s thigh, the white tips of her manicure pale moons against his trousers. A warm flush that started in Lee’s stomach rises up to her neck, as if she is a carafe someone is slowly filling with hot tea. By the time the warm feeling reaches her chin, she is leaning back in her chair, her legs spread in an unladylike posture, laughing so hard at the things Jimmy is saying she forgets to hide her crooked front teeth with her hand. So when Poppy yawns, looks around at the restaurant, now half empty again, and says, “Let’s go somewhere—anywhere,” Lee is ready, doesn’t even care where they take her.

“Drosso’s,” Jimmy says with authority, standing and throwing a sheaf of bills on the table—how many Lee doesn’t know, but it seems to her a vast sum, more than enough to cover the cost of her meal—and then they are outside, and it is raining, so they pile into the back of a taxicab, pressed so close together that Lee can feel the stubble on Poppy’s exposed thigh as it pushes against her own. Antonio is wedged against her other side, staring out the window.

“Careful of your glass,” Jimmy says to Poppy, who has brought her wine into the cab and takes small sips each time they stop.

Poppy turns to Lee as if they are in the middle of a conversation, which maybe they are—Lee cannot recall. “A few weeks ago Caresse and Harry had us drive out to Ermenonville. They own a mill there, and we met in the field behind it. I got into Harry’s car and Caresse got into Jimmy’s car. Lavender leather seats, custom work. At first it was the wildest thing. One switch and you’re leading a gorgeous new life. Harry gave me his gardenia—”

Jimmy reaches over and grabs Poppy’s face roughly, pushing her cheeks together so that her mouth distorts into an unattractive pucker. He lets go after a moment and she takes a sip of her drink as if nothing has happened. She is quiet for the rest of the ride. Antonio pays no attention to them, and when Lee glances at him he is cleaning his fingernails with a penknife. Usually this would disgust her. He has huge hands, long tapered fingers. Artist hands, Lee thinks. The knife blade reflects the light of the streetlamps as they drive, and Lee watches him for a while, then looks out at the city, watery and indistinct through her own reflection in the cab’s fogged windows.

  

Drosso’s turns out to be an apartment on the third floor of an unremarkable building in Montmartre. The exterior gives no hint of the opulent world they find inside, rooms opening one into the next like brilliantly lit jewels, furnished with silk settees and Persian rugs and piles of embroidered satin cushions. Drosso himself greets them, arms outstretched, dressed in the strangest and most fantastic coat Lee has ever seen, a long burgundy jacket with attached silk butterfly wings that flutter behind him as he approaches. He kisses everyone on both cheeks, awkwardly long kisses.

“Magnifique,” he whispers, and holds Lee at arm’s length and makes her twirl for him, ducking her under his wing and letting it brush over her like a curtain. When she has finished twirling, Drosso smiles and puts one arm around her and the other arm around Poppy and shows them to a dressing room, steps outside, and closes the door. A dozen brightly colored silk robes hang from hooks on the wall. Poppy begins disrobing immediately, piling her clothes haphazardly in the corner. At first Lee tries to watch her without looking as though she is watching her, but it doesn’t matter: Poppy is uninhibited, shimmying her way out of her garter belt and stockings the same way she must when she is alone.

When she sees Lee watching her, she says, “Everyone changes at Drosso’s,” as if that explains things. After debating it for a few more moments, Lee follows her lead. She fusses over the buttons of her dress, folds the garment extra neatly before setting it on the floor, and after she sees Poppy remove her brassiere she does the same, feeling as though she is back in the dressing room at a modeling studio. Once Lee is undressed, she chooses a sky-blue kimono and ties the belt tight at her waist, the silk cool and almost wet against her skin. She cannot bear to leave her camera—what if it gets stolen?—so she picks it up and tries to ignore how absurd she feels carrying it while wearing the robe.

As they emerge from the dressing room, Lee hears muted voices and low music coming from down the hall. Drosso is waiting. He leads them to the back of the apartment, to a library with gilded bookshelves, and then walks over to the shelves and pulls a lever. The bookshelf swivels open to reveal another huge room, this one painted deep eggplant, with several dozen people inside, most dressed in robes, reclining on sofas and the floor. In the center of the room is a low brass table with a hookah and a few opium pipes on it. A dark-skinned man sits cross-legged next to it, dressed in a brocade military jacket and a small close-fitting hat. He leaps to his feet as they come into the room and bows deeply. In a corner, a couple lies entwined, sharing sips from the valve of a hookah tube that snakes toward them from the table. The man’s hand rests in the woman’s hair, unmoving, and her eyes are closed. As Lee watches, the woman’s head starts to droop forward, and his hand clenches shut in her hair and holds her steady. The woman opens her eyes and smiles sleepily at him.

It is as if they have stepped out of Paris and into a Bedouin camp, the room a tent whose curtained walls muffle sound and throw great distorted shadows when people move around the space. A Moroccan screen in a corner half hides a kissing couple. One man lies facedown near the center of the room, so completely still Lee wonders if anyone is worried that he might be dead.

Lee does not know what to make of this place, these people, the thick smoke that hangs low in the room and curls around her ankles like a silent gray cat. Everything is disorienting: the smell, cinnamon and something harsher, a scent like unwashed bodies that makes her surreptitiously sniff her own damp armpits to make sure it isn’t her; the crouching man near the hookah, who has been staring at her since she came in and holds up one of the hoses each time she makes eye contact with him; the musician playing in the corner, a sort of low, droning cello that gives everything a nihilistic quality.

No one is paying attention to her, but Lee cannot stop thinking about herself: the way she’s cinched her kimono, the cumbersome camera case still clutched in her hand as if she is some kind of gawking tourist on Indian holiday.

She is drunk, but not drunk enough to consider smoking opium. That was her mother’s pastime—morphine, actually, the little blue vials lined up on the window ledge in her dressing room and glowing like sapphires in the sun. Lee looks around the room and sees her mother in all the drowsing women. “Go ’way, Li-Li. I’m tired.” There were times when her mother locked herself in her bedroom and ignored Lee for days at a time, emerging puffy and haughty, her eyes smeared with the remains of her makeup.

Lee has been high just once: she and her best friend, Tanja, tried laudanum together, and sometimes when she is sick she can still taste it at the back of her throat, cloves and bitter herbs and alcohol, the numbness of her tongue and the floating giddiness that came after it. She hated it, had panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.

Now she is trapped. Thinking of Tanja has made her miss her friend, and she wishes there were someone here who knows her. The bookshelf is closed behind her. Poppy has reunited with Jimmy, and Lee sees them embracing in a far corner. Drosso kneels next to a young man and helps him steady a needle into his arm. Only Antonio remains nearby, so Lee turns to him and he catches her eye and gestures to a bar cart she hasn’t noticed yet. She nods, grateful, and lets him fix her a glass. The truth is that she probably shouldn’t have more—she lost track of how much wine she had at the restaurant—but along with her nervousness she is filled with a reckless feeling.

Antonio brings her brandy, a man’s drink, and the bitter liquid cuts through the fug and instantly makes her feel better.

“You ever been here?” he asks her, his voice low. He was so silent at the restaurant it is a surprise to hear him ask a question.

Lee shakes her head. “I’ve only lived in Paris for a few months.”

“It’s not all just this.” Antonio gestures around them. “Drosso is an art collector. He’s very wealthy.”

“What does he collect?”

“Everything, I guess, though he loves modern work. He funds Littérature. That’s why we’re all here so often, suckling at the teat of our potential patron.” He nods his head toward a few men arranged around a hookah.

“All who?” Lee takes another swallow of the brandy, which is opening up her chest in a strange way, pulling like a hot knife through her breastbone.

“Éluard, Tzara, Duchamp. All the Surrealists. Here to channel the unconscious.” Antonio makes quotation marks in the air and smirks conspiratorially.

She knows these names, has heard them mentioned at New York parties, read them in literary magazines. Hearing Antonio say them is like feeling a key slide into a lock. “Do you know them?”

“Sure I do.”

The drone of the cello stops and Lee looks at Antonio, looks him straight in the face and realizes how attractive he is. His mouth is full, his lips dry, almost papery. His eyes are a beautiful soft gray, ringed with black lashes.

“Can you introduce me to them?” she asks, leaning toward him and wavering unsteadily on her feet. “I know them—I mean, I want to know them. I want to meet them.”

Lee is having trouble making sense, her words as wobbly as her legs, so she reaches out a hand and puts it on Antonio’s arm, hard and warm beneath his robe. She hears everything now that the music has stopped: the burble of the hookah, the click and hiss of smokers’ lighters over their pipes, the tink-tink of ice in her brandy glass. She takes another sip and then another.

“Now’s probably not the time,” Antonio says, his voice kind, and even though she tries to pull him in the other direction, across the room to where he said Duchamp is sitting, he gently leads her to an empty couch against a far wall and tries to take the brandy glass out of her hand. She won’t let him. She needs the cold crystal, the warming bite of the liquor.

“Can you get me another?” Lee asks him, and he looks at her for a while and then shrugs and does as she’s requested, trading her a fresh glass for her empty, and she lifts the new one to her mouth and takes a giant swallow.

“I’ll be right back,” Antonio says, or at least Lee thinks she hears him say it. In any case, he leaves her there, and the couch is deep and overstuffed and upholstered in a slippery fabric that’s just begging for her to slide down on it, so she finishes the new brandy and makes herself more comfortable.

Just before Lee thinks of nothing she thinks of this: That brandy is not just brandy. The voice inside her head is indignant, and then she passes out.

  

It could be minutes, it could be hours. Lee wakes up, still on the couch, her cheek pressed into a heavily embroidered pillow. She rubs at her eyes, opens them. Drosso stands over her, his butterfly wings hanging at his sides and his big shiny face inches from her own.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Lee mutters, batting her hand at him as if she is brushing away a fly. She lifts her head and looks around the room for Poppy or Antonio but doesn’t see them anywhere.

“I must tell you a passionate secret,” Drosso says in French. Lee is too confused to understand him, so he repeats himself a few times until finally another man comes over and says in English, “He says he has to confess something to you.”

This man is smaller than Drosso, with thick curly hair springing away from his temples.

Drosso speaks to the man in rapid-fire French. He holds a champagne coupe in his hand and points at Lee, talking so quickly that even if she were fully cogent she wouldn’t be able to follow him. The smaller man laughs and looks at her.

“He says…” The man pauses, seeming to debate whether or not to say what comes next. “He says that he’s never seen such beautiful breasts. He says your breast is like a more perfect version of the glass he holds in his hand. He wants to draw it and then have it made so that he can drink champagne from it. He wants to drink champagne from your breast while touching your breast.”

Through the whole statement, Drosso nods in furious agreement. Lee sits up. Looks down. Her belt is loose. Her kimono gapes brazenly from sternum to hip bone so that even in her fog she knows that Drosso must have been able to get a good look at her. She clutches the kimono’s fabric to her chest, crunching the blue silk in her fist as tightly as she can, and then stands up and pulls the absurd robe even tighter around herself.

The small man is smiling at her, and though his expression is friendly and almost apologetic, Lee wants nothing more than to be far away from him.

“Please tell your friend,” she says to him, twanging her American accent as imperiously as she can, “that he will never touch my breasts, not if I was falling from a burning building and my breast was the only thing he could hold on to, to save me from dying.”

He bursts into laughter as Lee walks away from him. She goes toward the bookshelf but realizes she has no idea how to open it. With one hand still clutching her robe, she feels across the shelves with her other hand, desperately searching for a lever or knob or something that will let her out. But she is trapped.

“Wait,” the man says. “Wait.”

Lee looks around, feeling frantic. “How do I get out of here?” she asks a woman who lies nearby, eyes closed. The woman doesn’t respond.

The man has followed her. He reaches for a small gold handle on the bookshelf, and it slides open easily. As she moves toward the opening, he gently circles her wrist with his hand.

“He’s bent,” he says, gesturing at Drosso. “He’d never try anything with you, or with any woman. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s all just silly. Theatrics.”

Lee shakes her head no.

“Who are you?” he asks.

She shakes her head again. She doesn’t want to tell him her name, doesn’t want him to know another thing about her.

“It’s all right,” he says. “You’re fine. I’m sorry he scared you.”

“I’m not scared. I just want to leave.”

“I understand. If you ever need anything, you can look me up. I’m Man Ray.”

The pomposity of his statement—not “My name is Man Ray,” but “I’m Man Ray,” as if there isn’t a chance in the world she wouldn’t know of him—astounds her. True, she does know of him: his photography appeared in Vogue right next to her modeling spreads. He is as well-known as Edward Steichen or Cecil Beaton in the fashion world—she heard his name mentioned at many parties before she left New York.

Man Ray reaches into his coat pocket—it is only now that she realizes he is not wearing a robe—and hands her a small card with his address printed on it. All Lee wants is to leave, to be alone someplace where she can pretend none of this ever happened, so she says thank you and takes the card and turns away, walking out as quickly as she can without looking as though she’s running.

It isn’t until she has made her way back to the dressing room, found her clothes and put them on with fumbling fingers, taken a cab all the way back to Montparnasse, and is in her own cold bed, the coverlet pulled up to her chin and tucked hospital-tight around her body, that the black humor of the situation hits her. All these months spent hoping to meet other artists, and she meets Man Ray at an opium den, where she is too embarrassed to do anything but run away. Alone, she cringes at the memory, until she has another thought, much more disturbing: her camera, left behind on the couch in her hurry.

Chapter Two. . .