Margot did not look at the booth. But she saw, out of the side of her eye, Dottie rise from her folding table and step to the camera's slot and collect both prints, one in each hand, before anybody else could get there. The first she held up to the light and examined, the bell on her sweater jingling, and then she walked to the Wall of Merry and pinned it at the very center. The second she did not hold up. She did not look at it at all. She slid it, face down, into the pocket of her cardigan, and sat back down, and picked up her clipboard, and wrote something on it, as though nothing had happened.
Their eyes met across the room. Dottie gave her a small nod, the kind of nod you give someone across a funeral.
Margot got her coat.
Wes caught up with her at the elevator. He had put the Santa hat down somewhere and his hair was standing up on one side where it had been.
"I just want to say one thing," he said.
"Wes."
"It was fair. What you said. It was fair."
The elevator doors opened. She stepped in. She turned around and looked at him standing in the hallway under a loop of bunting, a man in a good suit who had come in the back way with a bag of ice nobody needed, and she felt a hundred things and allowed herself none of them.
"Monday," she said, and the doors closed.
* * *
The first print, when she saw it on Monday morning, was a perfectly ordinary holiday picture. Two coworkers in a photo booth, laughing at something out of frame, a man in a Santa hat that was too big for him, a woman in tinsel antlers with her head thrown back. You could have put it in a brochure for the company. You could have put it on a mug.
It was the second print that the whole floor wanted to see. And the second print, Dottie told anyone who asked, had come out blank.
"Old film," she said, with the serenity of a woman who has been lying to salesmen on the telephone for three decades. "Bettina bought a box from 1981 off the internet. Half of it's no good. There's a reason they stopped making it, dear."
"Can we see the blank one?" said Fergus.
"No," said Dottie.
"Why not, if it's blank?"
"Because it's blank," said Dottie, "and you have a ten o'clock with the frozen pizza people, and you're going to be late."
* * *