I reach into the pocket of my rain jacket. The limestone heart is there, which is odd because the last time I touched it, the thing was in the pocket of my jeans.
“What should I do?” I ask.
“No grand gestures,” Kate says firmly. “She doesn’t need more performance.” She looks at me. “She needs someone who actually sees her. The real her. Not the brand.”
“I think I know what to do,” I say.
Kate reaches for one more cookie and stands. “Good. Now can you get me that dog stroller? Your mother bought it and Steve refuses to walk in the rain.”
The next day, I wake before dawn.
Not because of an alarm or a contractor call or an email from the New York office. I wake because the room is too quiet and the bed too empty. I miss Lauren. A lot.
I throw on some cargo shorts and an old T-shirt. Somehow, the heart-shaped rock is in the pocket already, but I don’t question its magic. I slip out of my suite and pause at Lauren’s door. Then I knock.
No response. I power walk down the hall, dash downstairs, and go outside. The resort is silent at this hour. The air is cool and soft in the way Florida mornings can be, the cypress treesstill and dark against a sky that’s just beginning to consider color. Thank god the rain has stopped.
I follow the path to the springs. It’s uneven in places but the ground has soaked up all the rain and isn’t muddy, which seems like a small miracle.
I hear Lauren before I see her. Not her voice, but the click and hiss of a camera shutter
She's sitting at the water's edge in shorts, a T-shirt, and the walking cast. Her legs are extended in front of her, the black cast stark against her bare, tanned leg. There’s a sneaker on her other foot.
It’s funny, she’s sitting in the same place she found the stone, that first night. She’s shooting toward the spring, not toward herself, not toward anything packaged or curated. Just the water. She’s capturing the light. Whatever she’s seeing that I probably can’t.
I've watched her photograph things and never seen her expression like this. She’s still, but in a way that’s different from concentration. It’s like she'slisteningfor something rather than looking for it.
The turquoise glow of the water is more visible now than at any other time, the cypress trees reflected in the water, the sky barely pink at the edges. Lauren adjusts her angle a fraction of an inch and goes very still.
Click.
Then she lowers the camera and sits back on her heels, and I can see from the set of her shoulders that she found it. Whatever she was looking for. She exhales and a small smile plays on her lips. She’s so beautiful it makes a lump form in my throat.
I take a step forward. She hears it and turns.
She doesn’t look startled. It’s more like she half-expected me.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
I walk the rest of the way and crouch beside her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About the gallery. I should have asked. I was excited and I didn’t think about the fact that excitement isn’t the same as consent. It’s your work. Your decision.”
Lauren is quiet.
“The social media ask, that’s totally my fault too. I was thinking about what we could do together. I wasn’t thinking about how it would land on top of everything else that was already pressing on you that night. Or how it would come off as me using you.”
“Did Kate tell you about my father’s text?”
“Yes.”
She turns the camera over in her hands. “I overreacted. Or — I reacted to all of it at once, and you got the full force of something that was only partly about you.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize for how it felt.”
She looks at the water. “The gallery thing hurt more. My whole career has been other people making decisions about what I photograph and how and for whom. And then you did it too. Even though you meant well.”
