The Photographer's Return novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Final Hearing

The reporter wrote it down.

So did the man with the TV camera, in his way.

Every face in the ballroom turned from Warner to me, waiting.

"I know," I said.

That was all I had for him.

I picked up my coat from the back of the chair.

I walked out through the glass doors with Casey on one side and my lawyer on the other.

Nobody stopped us.

In the parking lot Casey loosened the camera tie and leaned on the car and laughed, quietly, at the sky.

"Five-thirty-one," he said. "You knew the minute."

"I was there."

"I know. That's the whole thing, isn't it."

He kissed me in the hotel parking lot, in front of the valet.

He had.

By morning the clip had been played on two local news stations and one national one.

"You can't be in the picture and take it" was in a headline.

So was "Influencer's Stage Confession."

My lawyer called at seven-thirty.

"The partners want to meet," she said. "Nine o'clock. At the office. They're returning the prints and the binder. All twelve. They asked if you'd come in person."

"Why in person?"

"I think," she said, "they want witnesses."

Whitmer Lake & Coast had glass doors and a lobby full of white orchids.

At nine on Thursday morning, the lobby was full of agents pretending to work.

The two senior partners met us at the reception desk.

One of them had sent us a fruit basket every Christmas for ten years.

He shook my hand and apologized before he'd let go of it.

The twelve prints were stacked against the wall in their frames, face in.

The blue binder sat on the reception desk, on top of a stack of brochures with my photograph on the cover.

I opened it.

Roll six was there. Frame thirteen, the dropped paddle. Frame fourteen.

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