I laid my contact sheets on the table and tried to make myself breathe like a normal human being. Tried to slow down the part of my mind that kept sprinting ahead—frames, pacing, cohesion, how the images would land on a wall under gallery lights, how strangers would look at them and decide what kind of woman I was.
And underneath all of it—like a heartbeat under everything else—Connor.
His voice still lived in my body. His hands, the way they had held me with that quiet insistence, like he was making an agreement with my nervous system. The steadiness of him. Thepresence. The sentence he’d said with no flourish at all—When you’re ready.
Not if.
When.
I could still feel how that word had warmed me from the inside out.
I hadn’t heard from him since I’d left.
Which was fine. He wasn’t a man who filled space just because silence existed. He didn’t text to narrate his day. He didn’t send emojis or little proof-of-life messages to soothe someone else’s anxiety. He moved like a man trained to conserve energy and attention for when it mattered.
And I told myself I understood that.
But still—sometimes my gaze flicked to my phone as if my body expected him to appear there the way he appeared in rooms. Like gravity. Like consequence.
I chose photographs with more instinct than logic.
Some were obvious—the ones that felt like Paris itself had taken my chin between two fingers and forced me to look. The river in early morning, silver and cold. A woman laughing too loudly on a bridge, cigarette between her fingers like punctuation. A man reading a book on the métro with the kind of reverence most people reserved for prayer.
Some were quieter.
Hands. Shoulders. The curve of someone’s back as they leaned into a window, half-lit, half-hidden. The spaces between faces when something was about to be said.
The truth was that my readiness to show my work had changed because I had changed.
Not because Connor had saved me.
Because he had seen me.
Because he had chosen me with no almosts. And the act of being chosen like that had snapped something into place. It hadmade me braver with my own life. Less apologetic. Less afraid that honesty would cost me love.
Now, honesty felt like the only thing worth offering.
Amaya drifted in and out of the shared workspace, earbuds in, her head tilted the way it always was when she was listening to something no one else could hear. She set a small recorder on the table near her laptop, tapped a few keys, then paused and watched me spread my prints like I was laying out tarot cards.
“You look like you’re about to jump off a cliff,” she said.
I let out a short laugh that wasn’t entirely stable. “I feel like I already did.”
She came closer, gaze skimming the images without touching them, respectful in that way artists could be when they knew better than to disrupt someone else’s process.
Amaya’s mouth curved. “Élodie will pretend she’s not proud, but she is.”
“Is she?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
Amaya shrugged. “Élodie’s pride looks like deadlines and pressure. It’s her love language.”
That made me smile for real.
Across the room, the printer whirred. Someone cursed softly in French. I caught only the tone, not the words, which was still the story of my life here—always a half-beat behind, always translating in my head, always slightly off-balance.
But it didn’t make me feel small today.
Today it felt … temporary. Like a bridge I was already halfway across.
