I took it without saying anything, because saying anything would have ended it. She never finished the sentence. When she saw the gallery three weeks later, that was the one — not any of the ones where she was ready, where she'd arranged herself into what she thought I wanted. The one where she'd forgotten I was there. She emailed me to say she'd stopped apologizing, mostly. I think about that more than she'd guess.

That's the frame

     The first hour of any session is negotiation. She's deciding whether I'm safe, I'm deciding what she does when she forgets to hold her face a certain way, and the camera is mostly a prop in that conversation. Nothing from the first hour ever makes the gallery. I've stopped expecting it to.

      The second hour is different. Somewhere in it, the person runs out of the energy it takes to manage how they're coming across. It's not relaxation exactly — it's more like they get bored of performing and their actual face comes back. With Sunday it happened at a hundred and four minutes. I know because she was telling me a story about her sister, a long one, and she stopped in the middle of it to think of a word, and didn't find it, and just sat there searching for it with her mouth slightly open and her eyes gone somewhere else entirely.

The second hour is where the work is

      I counted, which I don't normally do. It started around the fourth one, when I noticed she'd apologized for her posture, her laugh, the fact that she'd worn the wrong thing, and then — this is the one that got me — for apologizing too much. She said sorry for saying sorry. I told her that one didn't count and we kept going.

      She'd booked the session for her fiftieth. Not a party, she said, like the idea of a party was faintly embarrassing. Just wanted one decent photo before everything went, and then apologized for putting it that way. I didn't tell her that half the people who sit for me open with some version of the same sentence. It doesn't help to hear you're not unusual when you've worked yourself up to being brave.