Owen hovered near the hood with his phone raised like a divining rod. Naomi had stepped toward the marker stones, her camera lifted to the ridge but her feet exactly where Nick had told her to keep them.
His attention moved over Owen near the vehicle, Naomi inside the boundary, and the clean line back to the driver’s door if either of them got creative.
It was infuriating, really, watching a man make sure everyone was safe with that much quiet precision and having my body treat it like flirtation.
I followed him toward the rail, the Leica strap looped around my wrist. Behind us, Owen muttered something about one bar and corporate negligence. Naomi told him to stop trying to negotiate with satellites.
The overlook wasn’t dramatic in the way luxury brochures liked to promise. No one had softened it for consumption with champagne, architectural seating, or an infinity pool engineered for social media. A timber rail marked the safe line, marker stones held the boundary, and beyond them, the ridge fell away into a vast sweep of gold grass, low brush, and hard light. The road we’d climbed narrowed behind us, one pale scar cut through the land until it vanished into heat shimmer.
A bottleneck. One way in, one way out, and nowhere useful to hide.
Nick stopped beside me, close enough for his shadow to touch my boots. His attention cut back over the overlook in one quick sweep: Owen by the hood, Naomi inside the marker line, the vehicle angled for an easy departure.
Only after that did his attention return to me.
“You do that constantly,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Count exits. Count people. Count ways everything can go wrong.”
His mouth barely moved. “You don’t?”
Annoying, accurate, and devastatingly inconvenient.
I lifted the Leica. “Is this for the view, or are you about to make a point?”
“Both.”
“Efficient.”
“Necessary.”
He stepped behind me, not touching, but close enough that the heat of him altered the air at my back. “Look through it.”
I raised the camera to my eye.
The world narrowed. The ridge collapsed into frame, the lens dragging the far distance close. The lodge became a pale geometry tucked into the trees. The road behind us looked thinner than it had from the jeep. The valley spread wide and indifferent beneath a sky bleached almost white by noon.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“A view.”
“No.” His voice was low at my shoulder. “Try again.”
My finger stilled against the camera body.
“Are you seeing it, or solving it?”
Rude. Also correct.
I adjusted the focus ring, more for something to do than because the image needed sharpening. “I like understanding what I’m looking at.”
“You like knowing what changes if you let it in.”
The Leica felt suddenly heavier in my hands. Behind us, Owen had given up on reception and was now staring at the horizon like it owed him inner peace. Naomi angled her lens toward him, apparently deciding his spiritual crisis deserved archival evidence. She laughed under her breath. The sound should have made the moment less intimate.
It didn’t.
