His Lies Built My Empire, But My Camera Never Lies

The darkroom door swings open and the smell hits me first—acetic acid, sodium thiosulfate, the sharp chemical bite of fixer that I know better than my own perfume. I've developed hundreds of rolls in this room. I know exactly what it should feel like to step inside.

This is not that.

Gemma is adjusting the strap of her dress.

Not reaching for it. Adjusting it. The small, practiced motion of someone putting themselves back together.

The tongs leave my hand. I don't decide to drop them. They're just gone, and somewhere below me there's a metallic clang against the concrete floor that I don't quite hear because my ears have stopped working the way ears are supposed to.

The red safelight turns everything the color of an old wound. It catches Gemma's hair, my husband Cade's jaw, the contact sheet hanging from the drying line—still dripping, silver halide bleeding down in thin vertical trails. Like tears. Like the ones I'm not crying.

Gemma is Cade's stepsister. She was also, briefly, his fiancée—before she broke it off, before he found me, before we built what I thought was a life. She has a face that photographs beautifully and eyes that have never once been warm when she looks at me.

They're not warm now.

She smiles. Just enough. "Sloane," she says, like she's greeting me at a dinner party.

I look at Cade.

Cade—my husband, Cade Mercer, the man who held my hand through three miscarriages and called me his whole world at our wedding in front of two hundred people—does not flinch. He stands beside the enlarger with his arms loose at his sides, and he looks at me the way you look at someone who has just said something slightly embarrassing in public. Patient. Careful.

Pitying.

"You're hallucinating, Sloane."

His voice is steady. It's always steady. I used to love that about him.

"I can see her nipple."

I don't shout it. I state it. I watch his face while I say it, cataloguing the micro-movements the way I'd study a photograph—the slight tightening around his eyes, the almost imperceptible shift of his weight.

Nothing breaks. Nothing cracks.

"You're seeing what you want to see." He takes a step toward me. "We've discussed this. Your episodes."

The word lands like a thumb pressed into a bruise.

*My episodes.*

I repeat it quietly, tasting it. Turning it over. Feeling the shape of what he's been building.

"After the baby—" he starts.

"There is no baby."

Gemma moves closer. Her perfume is something expensive and floral, and it cuts through the chemical smell in a way that makes my stomach turn. She says it again, softer, like she's correcting a child.

"There never was."

The fixer residue on my fingertips burns. The skin is cracked there, at the knuckles, the way it always gets when I spend long hours in the darkroom. I hadn't noticed it hurting until right now.

I reach for the contact sheet.

Cade's hand closes around my