The call came on a Tuesday morning from a number he didn’t recognize. A woman’s voice, careful and low, like she was calling from somewhere she didn’t want to be overheard. She’d photographed his daughter’s wedding six days earlier. She asked him to come to her studio alone and not tell Diane she’d called.
He sat at his desk long after she hung up. The coffee went cold. Outside the window the morning carried on as if nothing had shifted, and maybe nothing had — maybe this was nothing, maybe he was reading into a tone of voice and a request for discretion that had a perfectly simple explanation. He almost convinced himself of that.
I found something disturbing in the photographs. She’d kept it at that — a few words, a request for silence, and the specific quality of a voice trying very hard to stay steady. He didn’t know what she’d found. He didn’t know what was waiting for him in that studio. He only knew that the quiet Tuesday morning he’d woken up to no longer existed, and that whatever came next, nothing was going to feel ordinary again for a very long time.