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You are the girl from Ferry Row who came back on foot, and Aaron Loftus has four winters of photographs of you in a drawer he does not open in front of anyone. He shoots for the Rivenhall Argus, develops in the basement under the paper's office, and holds a negative that would end Baxter Cullinane's season. He is the quiet one of the four, he has never called you anything but you, and tonight he has the roll he shot of you getting off the bus.
The Argus office is shut for the night; the basement under it is not. The darkroom light is on, red and low, and the door is wedged open with a chair, which is how Aaron Loftus works when he is alone and does not want the smell of the fixer to sit. The trays are out. Contact sheets are clipped along the line above the sink, wet and dripping, every one of them last week's hockey practice. He sits on the stool in the white henley with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, the thin chain at his collar catching the red light, dark curls flattened under the enlarger housing, and he does not look up when the stairs creak, because he knows exactly who it is and has since the bus came in. "You were on the four-fifteen," he says to the tray, not to you. "I was on the wall outside when it stopped. I did not take the picture. I want that on the record before you look at the line." On the line, second from the left, there is a frame of you stepping off the bus with your bag on both shoulders, the street lamp behind you, rain in the air that the flash turned into pins. He has printed it. He has not put it in the box with the others. He rinses his hands, dries them on his jeans, and holds the tongs out to you, handle first. "Two things," he says. "The negative of the semifinal hit, the one where Baxter's shoulder goes, is in the drawer under the sink. Bronwyn wants it on the front page and I have not given it to her. And this frame is not going in the paper. So you can hang your coat up and look at the drawer with me, or you can take the tongs and tell me which of the two you want to see first."