Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Nina’s email arrived on Thursday while Sophie was negotiating the placement of six borrowed paintings. She opened it to glance at one photograph, then enlarged the image until Lorraine’s skirt filled the screen. The dress was sage green.
The soft green settled into the garden colors so naturally that she almost forgot the white. Even the shawl had been changed, its folds still transparent against Lorraine’s arm.
Nina had included a short note explaining that these were proofs, with a sample color correction based on the photograph Sophie had sent after the wedding.
If Sophie approved, she could apply the same treatment to the remaining family images.
There would be an additional charge for the larger batch, which Sophie authorized before she looked at the amount a second time.
She had asked about the edit on the Tuesday after the wedding, alone in the museum parking lot. At the time she had expected Nina to hesitate or explain that it couldn’t be done. Instead Nina had asked for the reference color and whether Sophie wanted the shoes corrected too.
“Everything white,” Sophie had said. Her hand had been shaking around the phone. “Please.”
Now she scrolled through the proofs. Marianne’s face was turned toward hers in one, both of them laughing at something Kelly had said.
There was a photograph of Jesse fastening Sophie’s shoe behind the hedge, and another of his hand spread over her bare back while she looked up at him.
The images brought back parts of the day that had become difficult to reach beneath the argument.
Sophie chose six and posted them during lunch. She thanked Nina for capturing the day they had spent a year planning, then put the phone facedown and returned to the paintings. Eleven minutes later Lorraine called.
Sophie let it ring. Lorraine called again before the screen went dark, and Sophie answered because the persistence made her think, absurdly, that something might have happened to Hank.
“What have you done to me?” Lorraine asked. She skipped the greeting entirely.
Sophie leaned back in her chair. “I’m at work,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“The pictures. You changed my dress.” Lorraine’s voice rose on the last word. “Take them down.”
Sophie waited for a colleague to pass her open office door.
“The photographer matched the green dress you showed me,” Sophie said. “I thought you’d be relieved, after what happened at the cleaner.”
The silence lasted long enough for Sophie to picture Lorraine taking the phone away from her ear.
“You have no right to alter my appearance. I look ridiculous.” Lorraine drew a breath. “People know that isn’t what I wore.”
“You look very nice,” Sophie said. She opened the photograph on her computer and studied Lorraine’s elegant green silhouette. “Hank’s tie matches.”
“Don’t be clever with me,” Lorraine said. “I want the real photographs.”
Sophie enlarged the image until Lorraine’s face was out of the frame and spoke over her next demand.
“These are the photographs we’re using,” she said. “You can ask Nina about purchasing copies.”
Lorraine gave a sharp laugh. “After your friend destroyed the dress, you had to destroy the memory too. Does Jesse know you’ve done this?”
“Jesse will see the previews tonight,” Sophie said. She sat forward. “I need to get back to work.”
“You don’t get to hang up on me,” Lorraine said. Her voice had become low again, almost intimate.
Sophie ended the call. She sat with the phone against her ear until a colleague appeared in the doorway and asked whether she was free.
She expected Jesse to be angry when she got home. Instead he was making dinner, wearing the old gray T-shirt she stole whenever he left it on a chair. He had chopped too many onions and opened a bottle of wine, and he kissed her at the door with one hand still holding a wooden spoon.
“I’ve seen the pictures.” His mouth twitched. “Green, huh?”
Sophie set down her bag. “It was the color she chose.”
“I know.” He returned to the stove and stirred the pan. “It looks good.”
“She called me at work. Twice.”
“She called me five times.” Jesse turned down the burner. “You could have warned me.”
“Would you have asked me not to do it?”
“I would’ve liked to get through work without five calls about it.” He divided the food between their plates. “Sit down, Soph. It’s ready.”
He gave her the fuller plate. Sophie waited until he sat down before asking for wine, and he poured it without saying anything else about the photographs.
They ate at the kitchen table. Jesse looked through the photographs on her laptop, stopping at the one where he was fastening her shoe.
He reminded her how she’d worried about crushing the flowers behind her, and Sophie remembered that he had told her she could sit on his knee instead.
For a few minutes they talked about the wedding without Lorraine entering the conversation.
Then his phone rang. Her name appeared on the screen beside his plate, and Jesse let it ring until it stopped.
“You can answer,” Sophie said. She immediately wished she hadn’t offered.
“We’re eating,” he said. He took another bite, but she saw his attention move toward the phone when it vibrated with a message.
He called Lorraine back after dinner. Sophie was loading the dishwasher when she heard his voice change in the next room, becoming firmer than it had been on the back steps.
“No, you don’t look awful,” he said. “You look like you meant to look.”
Sophie stopped loading the dishwasher. Jesse came into the kitchen while his mother was still talking, and she stepped back to let him reach the kettle.
“You sent us the picture,” he said into the phone. “You picked that dress yourself.”
“Mom, enough,” he said. “I’m not making her take them down.”
Lorraine’s voice rose. Jesse moved the phone away from his ear, and Sophie heard the words after everything she did to me before he lowered the volume.
“We’ll talk another day,” he said. “Good night.”
He ended the call and stayed beside Sophie at the dishwasher. “She hates green now, apparently,” he said. “She spent half my childhood painting everything green.”
“I still wish you’d told me,” he said. “But she doesn’t get to talk to you like that.”
Sophie put her arms around him. He held her quickly, almost roughly, and she pressed her cheek against his chest until the tightness in his shoulders eased.
Later she found Lorraine’s new post. It was another unedited photograph from the wedding, captioned as the last happy moment before the accident that hadn’t felt accidental. Sophie read it once and closed the app without showing Jesse.
Upstairs, water began running in the shower. Sophie left her phone on the kitchen counter and went to him.
He was standing at the sink when she came in. Sophie slid her hands under his shirt from behind, pressing her mouth between his shoulder blades, and felt him go still.
“Hello,” he said softly. He covered one of her hands with his.
“Take this off,” Sophie said. She tugged at the hem, and he turned to help her.
He kissed her against the bathroom door, one hand beneath her jaw, the other finding the zipper of her skirt.
She pulled him closer by the waistband of his jeans, wanting the familiar weight of him and the brief relief of wanting something without having to defend it.
When he lifted her onto the edge of the counter, she laughed against his mouth and wrapped her legs around him.
They didn’t make it into the shower until much later. Afterward, in bed, Jesse lay with his head on her stomach while she combed damp hair away from his forehead, and the phone downstairs rang twice without either of them moving.
In the morning Jesse left a paint sample beside her coffee. He wanted to use the same green on the workshop door when they finally replaced his mother’s old sign, and had drawn an arrow from Lorraine’s name to his own. Sophie tucked the sample into her bag to show Kelly.
On Sunday Sophie printed a photograph of the two of them beside the fountain.
She put it in the small silver frame from their weekend at the lake, replacing the picture of Jesse squinting into the sun.
When he saw it on the hall table, he kissed her hair and said they should go back there for their honeymoon.
“Five days,” Sophie said. She turned the frame slightly toward the light. “No work calls.”
“Five days,” he agreed. He picked up his keys and left for work, and Sophie stood in the hall a little longer, looking at the photograph before she followed.