The photographer is ready. The silver umbrellas are raised to gather the light. He holds a light meter to the girl’s chest. Hair and Makeup share a cigarette. There are two other models on this trip, and they watch from a distance. The sea mumbles against the dunes. The girl looks especially bare, surrounded by people who are dressed. She is still so new the camera frightens her. Jann has removed it from his tripod and is holding it near her face. “This face,” he says, pausing to glance at the rest of them. “Will you look at this face?”

They look. It is delicate as a birdcage. Jann squints behind his camera. The rhythm of the shutter mingles with the breaking waves. Catching it, the girl begins to move.

“There,” cries Jann, “that’s it!”

They look again. Bernadette looks and sees it, too, feels the others see it. In the way the light falls, there is something; in the girl’s restless hands, her sad mouth. A stillness falls. She is more than a skinny young girl on a beach; she is any young girl, sad and longhaired, watching a frail line of horizon. The camera clicks. Then the moment passes.

As they watch her go, Bernadette reaches under the table and touches him, softly at first, then more boldly. It’s amazing, she thinks, how you can just do this to people. Like stealing. Luckily, the youngest girls don’t know it.

Jann looks at her and swallows. She decides that he is younger than she thought. She sips her beer, which tastes of smoke, and does not move her hand. “What does this remind you of?” she says.

He shakes his head. Color fills his cheeks.

“Let’s go upstairs,” says Bernadette.

Bernadette looks again at the picture. Sunlight fills the girl’s hair. The sand is pale and bright as snow, the sea turquoise. She longs suddenly to be in those white dunes, as if she had never seen anything like them before. She must remind herself that she was standing just outside the shot, that she chose the girl’s bathing suit.

“Have you ever noticed how meaningful these things can look?” she asks.

Jann laughs. “Have I noticed?” he says. “It’s my shot.”

Bernadette flips the picture back among the others. Her voice goes soft. “I meant in a general sense.”

“In a general sense,” says Jann, “that’s how they work.”

“Of all those places you’ve been,” he says, “which was your favorite?”

Bernadette sighs. She is tired of questions. Strangely, she cannot remember anyone having asked her this one before. Is that possible? she wonders. Surely someone asked, surely she had some answer. She tries again to move her hand. Jann holds it still.

“I liked them all,” she says.

“Bullshit.”

She feels a surge of regret at finding herself still here, at getting caught in this discussion. Jann moves her hand from his stomach to his chest. The skin is warmer there, close to the bone. She can feel the beating heart.

“There must be one that stands out,” he says.

Bernadette hesitates.

“New Orleans,” she says. “My honeymoon.”

It is the only place she can think of. She feels suddenly that she might begin to cry.

“It’s strange,” she says. “Going back.”

“To them?” Jann gestures at the group. “Or back?”

“Both,” she says.

Later today they will fly to Nairobi. Tomorrow morning, New York. Two weeks from now she leaves for Argentina.

“Everything fades the minute you’re somewhere else,” Bernadette says. It’s a mistake to say these things. “It fades.”

“More eyes,” he says. “Make them harder.”

The girl lifts her chin, sharpening the thin line of her jaw. Her eyes are bright and narrow. She looks at Jann and Bernadette with the sad, fierce look of someone who sees a thing she knows she cannot have.

Jann is excited. “Kiddo! You’ve got it,” he cries.

She does, Bernadette thinks. In three years she will probably be famous. She will hardly remember Lamu, and if she runs across pictures of herself on this beach, she’ll wonder who took them.