My stomach drops.
The shoot starts four weeks from now and runs for three. I pull up my calendar. The Harbor District timeline is color-coded: green for locked deliverables, yellow for flexible deadlines.
The final Board presentation is green. First week of the Dubai overlap. The photography review session is green. Second week.
If I take this job, I'm gone for the last two weeks of the project. Sam presents the final pitch alone or they pair her with someone else.
I close the calendar and look back at the email. The cursor pulses in my inbox. I hit Reply. The empty message window opens and I type:I'm in. Send me the contract.
My finger hovers over the Send button.
Forty-five thousand dollars.
I don't press it.
I open the calendar again and stare at the green blocks. The old version of me would have hit send before finishing the first read. He would have replied "yes," figured out the logistics later, and booked the flight that afternoon. I've been doing this for ten years—saying yes, moving on, chasing the next thing.
I look at the photo on my screen—the dawn shot from this morning, frame eighteen. The one Sam and I debated before the argument. The light is perfect and the composition is tight.It works because we both pushed in different directions until it locked.
I close the reply window without sending. The email sits in my inbox, unanswered.
I look at the calendar again, then at the photo.
If I leave, I get my forty-five thousand dollars, my international profile, and my absolute freedom. But Sam presents alone. And I don't finish what we started.
I lean back in my chair. The room is quiet except for the hum of the laptop fan.
Ten years of running. Ten years of never staying in one place long enough to get attached to anything. That was the plan. That is who I am.
I save the editing file and close the laptop. The screen goes dark, leaving me sitting in the stillness.
The email is still waiting. I should send it. I should take the money and the exit door.
But for the first time in my life, I don't want to leave.
Chapter fifteen
Sam
The office is empty.
The cleaning crew passed through an hour ago. The hallway lights are on motion sensors now, flickering off in sections as the building settles into silence. It's just me, Tom, and the glow of two monitors casting blue-white light across the glass conference table.
We’ve been at this for three hours.
I had intentionally set up my laptop on the exact opposite side of the table tonight. A physical barrier. No sitting shoulder-to-shoulder like Wednesday night. No accidental brushing of arms. I need the distance.
But it hasn't stopped the rhythm. He flags an image, I pull the site plan, and we know without speaking whether it works.
The sushi containers sit between us.
He brought dinner. Showed up at six-thirty with a brown paper bag and set it down next to my keyboard without asking if I'd eaten. I stared at it for a second.
Salmon nigiri. Edamame. Pickled ginger.
"How did you know I like salmon?"
He shrugged, already pulling a contact sheet onto his screen, and set his phone down on the glass table next to his coffee cup. "You mentioned it. During the south elevation site walk. You said the food truck by the gate had good salmon rolls."
