The next morning Isidro said, “An idea came to me. I believe I can talk to him and make him see he needs me.” His wife didn’t say anything. But as he drove away in his black Chevrolet taxi that had traveled 170,000 miles and always returned to this home, he saw her standing in the doorway with their four children, watching him leave. Something she had never done before.

Here was the plan. Pick up the tourist’s prints at the Fast Foto place, deliver them to him and refuse to accept payment. A risk, but look at it as an investment. No, please, it’s my gift for the pleasure of driving you and for your generosity. Something like that. Then… It’s too bad you haven’t been out on the island, have the pleasure of the drive to Luquillo. Or… Oh, what a fine day to go to El Yunque, the rain forest. Or Utuado to see the pottery.

The goddamn prints cost him more than twenty-seven dollars.

He sat in his taxi outside the Fast Foto, still thinking, getting the words in his mind. He opened one of the envelopes of prints, not curious, but to be doing something. They were pictures the tourist had taken of the beach during the past three days. Twenty-four prints-Isidro began to go through them-all in beautiful color.

Less than halfway through he stopped and started over, already feeling an excitement. He looked at the first prints again quickly before continuing on, wanting to be sure the subject of nearly all these pictures was the same and not there by accident. Isidro felt himself becoming inspired but nervous and laughed out loud. He became calm again looking at pictures from the second envelope, taken in the Old City. Fortaleza, Casa del Callejón, those places…

But in the third envelope he was back at the beach of Escambron. Here was an ice-cream vendor, here was a man displaying jewelry on a straw mat. Girls, yes, pictures of girls and a number of shots that were so bright they showed almost nothing. But of the forty-two prints in the two envelopes of beach pictures-count them-twenty were of Iris Ruiz. It seemed more than that, one after another, so many views of her in different poses. Wherever the tourist went on that beach he must have been watching Iris, taking pictures of her through his long lens.