Nora Voss photographs the bereaved. Eleven years of sitting in living rooms with widows and orphans and parents who've buried children, making portraits of people in the worst season of their lives. Most photographers won't touch the work. Nora can't stop.

Because roughly one session in twenty, her camera captures something that wasn't in the room.

A hand on a shoulder when the subject was alone. A shadow with no source. Fingers laced through a widow's hands. Forty-three files in a folder on her desktop labeled "errors." She has never told anyone.

Graham Tierney calls on a Wednesday in November. His wife Claire died three weeks ago. He wants a portrait in their home, a Victorian on Birch Lane where Claire played Chopin on a piano by the fireplace every evening for thirty-two years while Graham read in the wingback chair beside her.

Session one: forty-eight frames. Claire appears in five of them. Standing behind the piano, sharp and clear, hands on the lid, mouth open as if trying to speak.

Session two: sixty frames. Claire appears in thirty-one. She's closer. Both hands on Graham's shoulders. Her expression is desperate.

Session three: eighty-four frames. Claire appears in seventy-one. She is draped over the chair, arms around him, cheek against his head. Nora reads her lips across thirty consecutive frames.

"Help him stop."

Graham has been taking sleeping pills. The doctor prescribed them after the funeral. Two bottles of thirty. Seven pills remain. Fifty-three pills in thirty-five days. He's been trying to get close enough to the edge to reach Claire on the other side.

Claire isn't trying to pull him through. She's trying to keep him here.

Nora has the photographs. She has the pill count. And she has maybe three or four nights before the thing Claire is screaming about becomes the thing no one can fix.