The shoot was on a Saturday in December.
Ivy was eight months old. Mei Hart was visiting. The city outside was doing the specific grey of a December morning that hasn't decided if it's going to be cold or just cold-adjacent.
Lina left at nine.
Daniel's studio was different from the ones she usually worked in — smaller, personal, with the accumulated texture of a space that was used for private work rather than client work. His own photographs were on the walls, unframed — prints pinned or clipped, a working arrangement rather than a finished one. She looked at them while he set up.
Eleven portraits. She recognised three of the people — a musician she knew of, a woman who ran a community organisation she had read about, a man who was a writer. The others she didn't know. Each portrait was different in subject and setting but had the quality Daniel had described: people in the middle of something.
