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he wouldn’t be home. Why had she come over, regardless? Worried that their problems might be starting again, he pressed his remote-control garage opener, steered into the single stall, and shut off the engine. After hours of listening to the cacophony of rain drumming on his roof, he sat motionless, wearily enjoying the comparative silence. Then he pressed the remote control again and got out of the car. Despite the rumble of the descending garage door, he heard another door, the one at the top of the stairs. Kitchen light spilled down.
    “Mitch?”
    As Jennifer appeared above him, he saw her through an imaginary camera, its lens intensifying her. Nimbuslike, her blond hair seemed to radiate the light behind her. She wore gray slacks and a crewneck navy sweater. Her lips had a touch of pale orange lipstick.
    “Are you all right?” She took several steps down toward him.
    “Didn’t your assistant give you my message?”
    “Message?” Jennifer looked confused. “No. I was away from the office all afternoon. By the time I had a chance to call in, my assistant was gone.”
    Coltrane’s shoulders relaxed. It had just been a simple misunderstanding. It wasn’t going to be like before. He gripped the railing and climbed to her.
    “I got worried when you weren’t here,” Jennifer said. “Then I finally noticed the open magazine on your kitchen table. When I saw the article in the calendar section, the time and date for the Packard exhibit, I figured out where you’d gone.”
    “If you ever decide to get out of the magazine business, you’d make an awfully good detective.” Coltrane shut the kitchen door. “You wanted to know if I’m all right. No.” He stroked her hair and kissed her; her lipstick tasted of apricots. “I was a fool. I should have stayed home. With you.”
    The compliment made Jennifer’s blue eyes seem as clear as the Caribbean when the sun emerges from behind a cloud. Then something else he had said registered on her, making her frown. “Why did you call yourself a fool?”
    “Let’s just say meeting Randolph Packard wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be.”
    “You have awfully high standards.”
    Her remark puzzled him. “I’ve admired his work since I was old enough to tell a good photograph from a bad one.”
    “Then I don’t know what more you could want. From everything I hear, things couldn’t have gone better.”
    “Everything you hear?” Coltrane creased his brow.
    “Packard phoned fifteen minutes ago.”
    “
What
? You’re kidding me.”
    “He got your number from the magazine photographers directory. He thought you’d be back by now. When I told him you weren’t, he talked about you. You made quite an impression on him.”
    Coltrane felt a dizzying sense of unreality.
    “He said he hasn’t met anybody as honest as you in a long time. What on earth did you say to him?”
    Coltrane sank onto a kitchen chair. “Actually, I insulted him.”
    Jennifer’s mouth hung open.
    “I told him I thought his photographs at the exhibition were ugly.”
    “You certainly know how to win friends and influence people.”
    “Believe me, I wasn’t exaggerating about his photographs. They’re as ugly as the ones
I’ve
been taking.”
    “And the ones you removed from your wall?”
    Coltrane turned toward his living room. During the day, he had taken down all his framed photographs. His
Time
cover of an American soldier spooning food into a skeletal child’s mouth in Somalia, his two
Newsweek
covers (one of which showed a widow keening, holding her dead daughter in one arm and her dead husband in the other after a rocket attack in northern Israel), and his much-reprinted Associated Press photo of the first wave of American helicopters to invade Panama. These and other sensational highlights of his career were now stacked on a closet shelf. “It takes one shitty photographer to recognize another.”
    “Maybe that’s why he wants to do a project with you,” Jennifer