Bride Quartet Collection by Nora Roberts Page B

savings and whatever we could beg, borrow, or steal into it. The start-up costs, licenses, stock, equipment. The expense of turning the pool house into my place, the guest house into Emma’s. Jack did the designs for free. Jack Cooke? Do you know him? He and Del met in college.”
    “Yeah, a little. I remember they were tight.”
    “The small town that is Yale,” Mac commented. “He’s an architect. He put a lot of time into the transformation. And saved us God knows how much in fees and false starts. The second year we were barely treading water, with all of us still having to take side jobs to get by. But, by the third, we eased around the first corner. I understand working through the panic sweat to get what you want.”
    “Why wedding photography? Specifically, I mean, for you. It doesn’t feel as if it’s only because it fit the bigger picture of the partnership.”
    “No, not just that. Not even that first, I guess. I like taking photographs of people. The faces, the bodies, the expressions, the dynamics. Before we opened Vows I worked in a photography studio. You know the sort where people come for pictures of their kids, or a publicity shot. It paid the bills, but . . .”
    “Didn’t satisfy.”
    “It really didn’t. I like taking photographs of people in what I think of as moments. The defining moment? That’s the killer, that’s the top of the mountain. But there are lots of other moments. Weddings, the ritual of them and how those inside them tilt and angle the ritual to suit them personally—that’s a big moment.”
    Smiling, she lifted her cup with both hands. “Drama, pathos, theater, grief, joy, romance, passion, humor. It’s got it all. And I can give them all that through photographs. Show them the journey of the day—and if I’m lucky, that one defining moment that lifts it out of the ordinary into the unique. Which is the really long way of saying I just like my work.”
    “I get that, and what you mean by the moment. The satisfaction of it. It’s like when I can see even one student’s mind open up and suck in what I’ve been trying to feed them. It makes the hours when it feels like routine all worth it.”
    “I probably didn’t give my teachers many of those moments. I just wanted to get through it and out where I could do what I wanted. I never saw them as creative entities. More like wardens. I was a crappy student.”
    “You were smart. Which cycles back to teenage obsession. But I’ll just say I noticed you were smart.”
    “We didn’t have any classes together. You were a couple years ahead of me, right? Oh, wait! You were student teacher in one of my English classes, weren’t you?”
    “Mr. Lowen’s fifth period American Literature. Now please forget I said that.”
    “Not a chance. Now, I’m not running away, but I have to go. I have another shoot. Your sister’s engagement portrait, in fact.”
    “I didn’t realize you were getting to that so quickly.”
    “The doctor has the evening free, so we worked it out. But I need to go, get a sense of their place and the two of them together.”
    “I’ll walk you to your car.” He took out bills, tucked the ends under the saucer of his cup.
    Before she could shrug into her jacket, he’d taken it to help her into it. He opened the door for her, stepped out with her into the breathless cold.
    “I’m a block and a half down,” she told him. “You don’t have to walk me to my car. It’s freezing out here.”
    “It’s fine. I walked from my place anyway.”
    “You walked?”
    “I don’t live that far, so I walked.”
    “Right. You like to walk. Since we are,” she said as they walked by cafes, restaurants, “I’ll mention something that got bypassed due to the path our conversation took. Dr. Maguire? You got your PhD?”
    “Last year, finally.”
    “Finally?”
    “Since it was the major focus of my life for about ten years, ‘finally’ works for me. I started thinking thesis when I was an