"I have a question that isn't a trap," she said. "If I stay in New York, will you keep choosing senators over showcases whenever the choice gets sharp?"
Theo sat down. "If you stay, I will tell my producer the truth earlier: that I have a life with people in it, and that some hours are not available for emergency glory. I can't promise I'll never get the calculus wrong. I can promise I won't disappear while I figure out the math."
"And if I go?"
"Then I will not punish you for going," Theo said. The sentence cost him. He paid it anyway. "I might ask if we can try distance without turning it into a museum of what we almost were. But I won't make you carry my fear as luggage."
Silence moved across the line, not empty. Then Rowan said, "That was an ugly honest paragraph. Thank you."
"You're welcome. My ankles still hate you a little."
"Tell them the ice sends its regards."
Wednesday, Ned Ashcroft developed the film in a rented darkroom in Queens that smelled of vinegar and old wood. He worked with the patience of a man who had learned that rushing a photograph was a way of lying to it. When the frame of Rowan and Theo rose up in the tray—the cream coat, the navy coat, the spin caught at the exact second before either of them remembered to perform—Ned felt the old familiar ache under his ribs.
His wife, June, had hated being told to smile. She preferred pictures where her face was busy with living. This one would have pleased her: two people mid-choice, holding each other not as decoration but as physics.
Ned hung the print to dry and wrote on the back in pencil, small: Dec rink / Vale & Quill / hold that pose. He did not write June's name. He did not need to. She was in the habit of the work.
Thursday arrived with a sky the color of wet slate and a wind that made every flag on Fifth Avenue work overtime. Theo met Rowan at the park entrance at four-thirty, as agreed. She wore the cream coat again, but the scarf was a deeper rose today, and her hair was down, bright against the dull afternoon. Theo had brought the skates in a tote bag like a penitent carrying relics.
"You didn't have to bring them," Rowan said.
"I did," Theo said. "In case the photograph requires a sequel, or in case I need a reminder that I am capable of looking foolish on purpose."
They walked to the booth together. Lottie saw them and grinned as if she had bet on their return and enjoyed collecting.
"Contact sheet and one print," she said, sliding an envelope across. "Ned says if you hate it, hate it politely. He's at the tree."