“Perfect,” said Karen. “I’ll send over your retainer immediately. Thanks, hon.”
She hung up the phone, weak with relief. With the festival gig, she’d be able to pay off her equipment.
She looked at the image again, grateful beyond belief that Ethan had found a way to hide the links. A photo like this, of Cherry Lake’s home-grown sweetheart good girl family photographer, would be career calamine, a death knell for Forever Yours Photography, not to mention Carrie’s personal reputation.
Yet she loved it. She’d loved that time in her life. This photo represented her changing into a different person, her on the brink of a different time. Breaking free, becoming someone new, someone… more.
Someone powerful.
And she’d used that memory every time a woman had come to her, wanting to recreate her own image.
A knock sounded on the studio door. She jumped and fumbled to close the picture.
“Carrie? Are you in there? I need to talk with you immediately.” A pause. “Did you know there’s a car sitting outside your house? I had to park behind it.”
Mom. And she didn’t sound happy. If she was here to complain about Jess’s latest shenanigans, Carrie wasn’t interested. She didn’t necessarily agree with her cousin’s choices, but Carrie would defend to the death her right to make them.
Thought it must be nice, she thought for the umpteenth time, to follow your heart without always worrying about what everyone thought.
“Hey, Mom,” she called. “Come on in.”
Cathy Logan entered the studio, but instead of glancing around her, as she usually did, like she was expecting something nasty to jump out at her from the corners, she strode straight inside, a page printed with a familiar photo held out before her.
No. Carrie’s stomach turned to ice. Dust motes floating in the sunshine slowed down, thickening the air. Every molecule, it seemed, went into suspended animation, pausing for the inevitable storm to follow.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked Cathy, shaking the paper. Of everyone who could have happened onto those links, it had to be the one person that would recognize her instantly, didn’t it?
“Have you any idea what people will say if this gets out?”
Ethan told her the links were disabled. Or gone. Or destroyed, or whatever he’d done to make them disappear.
“Since when…” Cathy gestured, sputtering, at the page as if it held the secrets to the underworld, “have you been involved in this… this…”
From some faraway part of her brain, a bubble of laughter rose inside Carrie. Inappropriate, suicidal laughter.
“Pornography!” Cathy managed to spit out, finally.
The ugly word instantly cut off her laugh.
“It’s not porn.”
“Oh no?” Her mother put her hands on her hips. “A picture of you, posed provocatively, almost completely naked. What else would you call it? What,” she added, “will I tell your grandfather?”
Her voice rippled slightly on the last word and Carrie’s heart stuttered. She recalled the time she and Jess had been caught dancing in Grandfather’s living room the summer they were thirteen. In their bikinis, still children at heart, they’d been practicing moves that never really would become natural to Carrie.
He’d looked at them, horrified, angry and sad, all at once, and Carrie had grabbed a towel, ashamed of the curves she was just getting used to.
Except for that one time, Grandpa Nate had always been so proud of her. His good granddaughter. The quiet, obedient one who’d always smiled at the right time, did as she was told and could be counted on to be a credit to the Nathan Jackson family tree.
Grandpa, who was old and didn’t need extra stress. If he had a heart attack because of her…
“We never expected something like this from you, Carrie.” She shook her head.
“It’s not what you think, Mom.” Her voice wavered and her hands shook as she took the page and dropped it into the recycling.
“Aunt Linda brought it to my attention.” Her mother’s high cheekbones were bright with color but she had no trouble aiming the full force of her gaze at Carrie. “Between the cherry harvest and the festival, she and Uncle Robert are about done in. And then they have to see something like this?”