Rosalie begs. Her back is straight and her red nails rest lightly on the table, but she begs nonetheless.
"Please, Carlisle. You know I can never get the background checks for the nurseries or the hospitals. I need this. Please."
Rosalie spends all her nights for a month learning about exposures and camera angles, shutter speeds and digital versus traditional. She has always had a good eye for what is beautiful, and the difference is that now she turns it outward instead of in.
Money can buy her what she needs. She stages a few shoots with her carefully posed siblings and some hired models in breathtaking locations. Japser makes her a webpage, and Esme and Alice ghost-write her some gushing testimonials. Within a few weeks, she has hundreds of emails.
Alice helps her plan her outfits. They turn Rosalie into a couture version of gothic-chic. She wears black lipstick, black clothes, and dark sunglasses that don't affect her vision at all. She has black lace gloves and snakeskin combat boots. She prepares an explanation for her sparkling skin: an art-school makeup experiment.
She needn't have bothered. It's as if she dons a layer of anonymity with every camera slung low on her hips or dangled around her neck. She is merely the photographer.
She books crazy hours and has nearly unlimited availability. Her reviewers rave about her responsiveness – "it's as if she never sleeps!" they gush. Carlisle worries, but she waves a gloved hand. "It's just a figure of speech."
For a year, she sees it all: weddings, birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs; babies romping artfully on the grass. Then she quietly takes down her webpage and sets the company email to an apologetic auto-reply.
The rest of the family is so shocked that they carefully say nothing. They wait for the outbursts, the Rosalie tantrums, but for once she is peaceful.
It is Emmett, as usual, who breaks the silence, late one evening. He twists a golden curl around his finger and gives it a gentle tug. "Why did you stop, babe?"
Rosalie understands what he is asking. She turns her head to talk low past his neck. "For a year, I saw my life, like I'd imagined it as a girl: as if I'd married Royce, the way he should have been, the way I thought he would be, and we had all these babies and lived in mansions. Sometimes it worked and we were happy. Sometimes it didn't and we weren't. I lived fifty lives, a hundred lives, and now I can let them go." She snuggles closer. "I can live with you."
Alice sneaks up on them, and takes a picture.
