Chapter One
Jules
THE BOOKING EMAIL FROMBobbie-Jean Hightower had been enthusiastic, personalized, and only slightly misleading. She'd found me through the Town & Country rescue-dog feature, she'd written, because what she wanted for her wedding weekend was someone who understood animals. Not a wedding photographer — they had one of those, a Dallas woman who'd done Texas Monthly covers and charged accordingly. Someone who could do justice to the residents of The Last Resort Ranch & Rescue. The horses. The dogs. The macaw, who Bobbie-Jean described as "a character," which I'd learned, in eight years of pet photography, was a phrase that always required follow-up questions.
I hadn't asked follow-up questions. The fee was the biggest of my career, and I'd said yes.
I photograph pets for a living. High-end, Manhattan-based. Persian cats in Tribeca lofts. Great Danes in penthouses. An iguana whose personal chef (the iguana's, not the owner's) had called the studio three times to discuss lighting angles. I built the client list from zero and I'm waitlisted nine months out, notthat my parents would have been impressed; pets weren't what they'd had in mind when they paid for Parsons.
I work alone in the field. Always have. Olivia runs the studio back home — the billing, the bookings, the escalating situation with Mrs. Whitestone's Persian, whose portrait session I'd postponed for this job and who was apparently not taking it gracefully. The field is me and one camera bag and whatever animal has decided today is the day to make me earn it. Animals read a crowd and shut down. I'd learned this in year one. I'd never regretted the policy. Animals, in my experience, are considerably more legible than people.
The vendor van turned off the highway onto a live-oak-lined drive, and Texas started happening.
Wide first, then mid, then detail. Photographer's instinct: the way you break down a new location before you understand what you've walked into.
Wide: four hundred acres of rolling green so vivid it looked retouched, and a sky so large it made Manhattan's look underexposed. The light came straight down with full conviction, no glass to negotiate with, no steel to catch it back. The silk of my blouse was processing this information in ways I wasn't prepared to address.
Mid: three white catering tents on a rise, two working barns, a ceremony meadow being laid out with white folding chairs by a crew in branded polos and lanyards, familiar enough from a hundred venue setups that I relaxed, briefly. Past all of that, two ranch hands on horseback were moving a small herd along the far fence line, unconcerned that a wedding was being assembled forty yards away from them.
Detail: a mini donkey alone in the nearest paddock. Head down. Ears at half-mast. Looking at nothing with complete conviction.
I had a capture list. Contingencies A through C. Backup drives in the camera bag, which I was going to have to carry through this gravel in the wedges I'd packed because I'd planned for Manhattan and apparently thought Texas was a different kind of Manhattan.
I did not have a contingency for the mini donkey.
The van stopped on a gravel drive in front of a sprawling ranch house with a wraparound porch. I gathered my camera tote, confirmed the lens cap was on, and climbed out.
The heat was immediate. Eighty degrees of early May Texas, full sun, the kind that doesn't negotiate. My blouse felt it first. My hair, flat-ironed that morning and protected through all of JFK, was already reconsidering at my temples. Biggest fee of my career. I’d talked a Persian off a $4,000 credenza. I could do this.
The macaw got me before I'd taken six steps.
"About damn time."
I froze. My camera bag swung. On the porch, perched on a wooden stand with the authority of a sitting judge, a Blue-and-Yellow Macaw fixed me with the focused displeasure of someone who'd been waiting for a meeting to start and had opinions about how long it had taken. It was enormous and vividly colored and clearly the senior-most person on the property.
"About damn time," it said again, in case the first one hadn't registered.
Then it switched to Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. The tone covered the gap.
Laughter came from twenty feet to my left. Real laughter, not the polite kind that checks whether it's appropriate first. I turned.
A man leaned against a fence post at the edge of the gravel drive, hat tipped back, arms loose on the rail. Tall — something over six feet, the kind of height that doesn't feel the need toannounce itself. Lean the way that comes from actual work and not a gym: wide through the shoulders, forearms on the fence rail with a farmer's tan that stopped exactly where a work shirt's sleeves would end. Dark brown hair, thick, a little too long on top, already doing what it wanted in this heat. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes from years of squinting into exactly the light we were both standing in now.
Blue eyes. Bright and entirely too amused, even across the gravel.
"Don't take it personal," he said. "Judge Judy doesn't like anybody."
I had a client-voice. I'd developed it at twenty-three for the specific purpose of making anxious Pomeranian owners feel their dog was in the hands of someone who had handled this exact situation seventeen times before and remained completely unruffled. I'd used it on socialites, on their Pomeranians, on a man in a Park Avenue co-op who'd tried to direct his Maltese's nose mid-session.
"It's lovely to meet you," I said. "Are you the groundskeeper?"
He laughed harder.
I was still working on my footing when whatever I'd just said caught up to me a beat late and cringed somewhere in the back of my chest. He hadn't given me his name and I'd already managed to condescend at him. Excellent professional start.
A man came around the corner of the house with his hand already out.
"Jules! You made it." Built like someone who'd spent years getting thrown from horses and choosing to get back on: wide through the chest, easy in the way of someone who'd never had a reason to be tense on his own land. "Stoney Ralls. The groom."
