Chapter 8: The Old File

Romy had rented a studio on Bull Street for her three weeks in Savannah.

It was a bare room on the second floor of a building that used to be a shoe shop.

I climbed the stairs that Tuesday afternoon with the proofs she'd asked me to approve and a box of lemon bars from Dee.

The door was open.

Prints were pinned all along one wall, in rows, edge to edge.

Brides and grooms, mostly.

A man laughing so hard he was crying.

A grandmother in a hospital bed holding a veil.

A little girl asleep under a table in a flower-girl dress.

They were wonderful.

"I didn't know you were this good," I said.

Romy was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop and a thermos.

She looked up and her whole face went careful.

"I'm competent."

"These are more than competent."

"They're what I do."

"They look like people forgot you were there."

"That's the whole job. Be the furniture."

I walked along the wall.

At the end of the row, a little apart from the others, was a smaller print pinned by itself.

I stopped.

It was a photograph of a young woman in a navy dress standing in a courthouse hallway.

She was holding a paper cup of punch, and she was staring out of a window with a distant look I knew very well from the mirror.

Her hair was twisted in a knot, and her gray eyes were turned to the light.

I knew exactly where the photo had been taken, because I remembered the cup.

"That's the courthouse," I said.

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