of the railing.
“It’s nothing to get upset about,” he said.
“You don’t get to decide what I’m upset about.”
“Cass—”
“I suspected you were going back. When you mentioned the cameras. But I was hoping you wouldn’t.” Unable to reach out and touch him, unable to stop him—she wrapped her arms around herself. “I agreed to three years,” she said, “and three years isn’t up yet.”
Then she stepped inside, away from him, to get used to that space between them. Again.
But she could feel him behind her. The front door was so white. Too white. She knocked into a plant.
“Today CNN decided to back us. Which is huge. Now we have money for more cameras, several large printers, and photo paper. They’ve hired me to document the project. One last trip. Three weeks and I’m done.”
She stopped in front of the fireplace.
“These people, they don’t have anybody,” he said. “They need me.”
“But you said you wanted to be with me.”
“I do want to be with you.” And he added, so quietly she almost missed it, “It’s not like your mother.”
But she couldn’t hear this from anyone else, not even Ethan. It belonged to her. She looked into his still blue eyes. “Don’t bring my mother into this.”
“Talk to me, please.”
She sat down on the fireplace ledge. “I don’t want you to go,” she said, tracing rectangle after rectangle of hard red brick.
He sat down across from her. “It’s just one more trip,” he said.
But that wasn’t the way it felt. She picked at the cracked mortar. Everybody in her life always chose there. A crumb of mortar popped out, right into the center of the rug, right into the eye of the blue storm. Now there was a hole in the mortar, and when she touched the brick beside it, it shifted.
After dinner, Cass called Vee, but she didn’t answer. It had to be over two weeks since they’d seen each other. They had talked, but they’d mostly texted, and here was another one. With Dillon. See you Saturday. Can’t wait to catch up!
Cass put her phone down and then picked it up again to check on the Fates, something she rarely did, wanting to leave work at work, but with each day that passed, the money problem seemed more real and their security at Howell, more fragile. When she clicked off, she headed down the hall to the bedroom.
Ethan was pulling a clean gray bottom sheet around a corner of their mattress.
“Do you miss sleeping on a real bed when you’re in Afghanistan?” she asked, picking up the top sheet.
“I never think about it,” he said. “But I miss sleeping with you.” He glanced at her while he covered another corner. “That, I do think about.”
She just stood there watching him on the other side—intently making up the bed.
He straightened. “Actually, I never think about it anymore. When I was first over there, I loved the pallets, being so close to the ground. I preferred that.”
She tossed him the clean, dark gray top sheet—which he let fall to the mattress.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it feels like you don’t like the part of me that loves Afghanistan.”
She looked at all the gray. “At first, I was afraid of it.” She looked over at him. “But I married all of you. I moved in here. With the blue wheelbarrow. And I hung your photos.”
It sounded, even to her, as if she were trying to convince herself.
“I want all of you. I just want all of you here.”
He swooshed open the top sheet. A storm cloud descending over the bed. Then he stopped again. “Cass, I need to go one more time. And, yes, I want to go, too. But you are the life I want. I don’t want a life over there.”
The bed was still between them, and something else was coming, she could feel it.
“Sometimes,” he said, more slowly this time, “it feels like you’re against me. Like Afghanistan is this part of me that you hate.”
“Oh, Ethan, sometimes your love of Afghanistan is the thing I love most about you. But sometimes—damn it, sometimes I do hate that part. I don’t want to, but I do.”
His eyes. So so blue.
She rubbed her chest over her heart. And she felt it like slow motion—his arms reaching for her, their bodies falling to the soft mattress, the safe feeling of his weight on her.
12
They had only hours before he left. With Howell’s fundraiser on Saturday, Cass didn’t feel guilty taking the day off. She hadn’t been to his studio in ages, but it looked no different than it had on their second date. Still no sticky notes, no mugs. A black wire desk that could just fold up and disappear. Nothing except the heft and size of the printer to indicate the permanent presence of anyone.
Westside Atlanta had started as the meat-packing district. Afterward, the warehouses lay empty for years. Ethan’s studio, across from their apartment building, was in the old White Provision building, on the third floor that was originally one cavernous empty space. Renovations had turned the floor into three studios, each with a huge window of light.
Ethan turned to a white plastic bin on a card table and removed the lid. The top photo was of Majeed, who had given Ethan the wheelbarrow bench. Her eyes always went first to the glassy sore on his dusty fingers, then to the torn threads of the red vest he was holding. His fifteen-year-old son had been wearing it when he was shot in his own house. He’d wanted to be a teacher.
“I’m going to be okay,” Ethan said, touching her elbow and drawing her to him, letting the lid fall to the cement floor. “I’m going to come back to you.”
But she thought of her father anyway.
As he collected what he would need for his trip, she wandered. On a small table by the printer were three 8½ by 11 photographs. The top one was of Baquir, Ethan’s fixer, who Cass liked to imagine magically knew what needed fixing. Baquir was slight, but tall, like Ethan. This photo, of Baquir carrying a floor lamp across a city street, was one of Ethan’s famous Portraits of Afghanistan. If she looked closely, the side of Baquir’s mouth had just the faintest upturn. Cass smiled. That’s why this photo was here. Ethan loved Baquir’s sense of humor, which was usually only present at the end of the day when the two of them were alone, but Ethan had caught it in the middle of the day in the middle of the street. In the next photo, also one she’d seen before, Setara was the only woman in a blurry sea of men. And, God, those eyes. This woman knew who she was and what she wanted. And she looked as if she might know who Cass was and what she wanted, too. In every photo, Setara stared straight at the camera, straight at Ethan. Cass turned and looked for him—on his computer—and she went back to the photo. Those famous sparkling amber eyes but also something else. These were the eyes of someone attuned to the world, someone who saw things and didn’t look away, someone who was in it—for better or worse. Cass scanned the photo—eyebrows, scarf, hair—but nothing fragile. Except Cass felt sure there must be and wondered what it was she couldn’t see. She put the photo of Setara down and placed the one of Baquir on top of it.
The last photo in the stack. An eerie blue shape, a yellow blanket across a wheelbarrow, a child bending to the ground. She picked it up and took it over to Ethan. “I’ve never seen this one.”
“It’s new, from this last trip.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “Baquir and I came across this woman and child in an alleyway. The mother was sitting on some cement blocks and covered, head to toe, in a burka. It rarely happens, but she asked me to take her photo.”
Cass