“Thank you.”
“Like, significantly worse than yesterday.”
“I appreciate the specificity.”
“Have you eaten today?”
Tyler thought about it. “I ate some Canadian bacon. The batch I burned. Parts of it were salvageable.”
“You ate burned Canadian bacon.”
“The inside was fine.”
Stella buckled her seatbelt and looked at him. Really looked—the photographer’s look, the one that catalogued every detail. The bags. The bandage on his wrist. The shirt he’d worn yesterday.
“Dad. This isn’t sustainable.”
“It’s been a week.”
“It’s been a week and you’ve canceled two photography jobs, you haven’t shaved, and your breakfast today was meat you burned at work.” She pulled her knees up on the seat. “The Shack’s doing great. You’re not.”
Tyler pulled out of the lot. She was right. She was always right in the way that sixteen-year-olds are right—clear-eyed and unfiltered and completely unwilling to let you lie to yourself.
“I texted Lindsey,” he said.
Stella’s whole posture changed. “You did?”
“Coffee tomorrow.”
“Good. That’s good.” She looked out the window. “Your ears aren’t even red.”
“I’m too tired for my ears to do anything.”
“That’s concerning.”
“It’s temporary.”
“Is it?” She turned back to him. “Because Anna looked terrible too. And Joey’s been texting me about his study group schedule, and I think he’s missing things. And Bea’s portfoliodeadline is next week and she was at the Shack until eight last night.”
Tyler pulled up to a red light and sat there, hands on the wheel, the bandage on his wrist catching on the leather. The Shack was working. The numbers were going up. But the people were going down.
“One more week,” he said. “Let’s give it one more week.”
Stella looked at him. She didn’t argue. But she didn’t agree either, and the silence in the truck said more than words would have.
They drove home. Tyler parked and reached for his camera bag—first time in days. It was dusty. He wiped the lens cap with his shirt and slung it over his shoulder. The weight of it was familiar and strange at the same time, like putting on a coat he’d forgotten he owned.
“I’m going to shoot the sunset,” he said.
“Good.”
“Want to come?”
Stella already had her camera bag over her shoulder. “Obviously.”
They walked to the overlook at the end of the street and stood in the last of the October light, cameras raised, shooting the ocean going gold. The sky had cleared during the afternoon—the grey burned off, replaced by the kind of copper-and-pink sunset that made photographers grateful and painters furious. Tyler’s shoulders loosened for the first time in a week. The viewfinder against his eye. The shutter release under his finger. The ocean filling the frame in ways that a pot of simmering water never could.
He shot until the light went purple. Stella beside him, working the same sunset from a different angle, her camera clicking in a rhythm that matched his. They didn’t talk. They didn’t need to. This was the language they shared — the one thathad brought them together before they knew how to be father and daughter. Light and timing and the decision of what to keep.
