Page 62 of Slapshot Bride

Maybe it’s a lost cause.

I exhale and toss the book aside.

I close my eyes against the sun and let myself sit with the warmth against my skin.

I open them and pick up the phone.

I don’t know what I'm about to do, and I don’t let myself overthink it. I tilt the phone toward the water, angle it to catch the skylight overhead, and tap.

The photo opens on the screen.

It's the water, and the broken white shape of the skylight reflected in it, and the way the surface fractures the light into something that looks like glass that has been dropped from a great height. It isn't a good photograph. It's exposed wrong. The composition is off-center in a way that doesn't pay off. The phone camera has flattened the depth.

I look at it for a long time anyway.

It isn't good.

But if I can recognize that it’s not a good photo, then that has to be a sign, right? Like I know enough to pick up from where I left?

Preston called it cute.

I have heard that sentence in my head for years. I have used it to keep myself from picking the camera up again.

Cute meant small. Cute meant not a real thing. Cute meant don't get serious about this, because serious women have lives I can't manage.

I pick up the pen, and reach for the notebook again. I open to a fresh page.

Photography, I write at the top, and then I cross it out, because the word is too small for what I want it to be, and I write underneath it getting my life back instead.

Then I write, slowly, the things I would need.

A camera. Not the phone. A real one.

A portfolio. Reshoot what I had, or start over.

Money. To live on, while I rebuild.

I stop on the last word.

That is where it falls apart, and it falls apart fast. I don't have money. I have money, technically, in accounts that are linked to Preston, or to my father, or to both of them, and every one of them is a thread I can't pull without him knowing exactly where I am.

I would need a lawyer. A lawyer who isn't affiliated to Preston, which in Los Angeles narrows the list.

I would need to disentangle the joint account, which means a sit-down conversation I'm not strong enough to have yet. I would need to untangle my parents from him, which is its own project, and one I can't even begin until I have my own ground to stand on.

I write lawyer underneath the money line. My fingers are weak now, because suddenly, it’s beginning to seem like an unachievable goal.

I’ll need money for a lawyer. And I need a lawyer to get my money.

Mason.

My face lights up. I pick up the phone, scroll to his name, and press call before I second-guess this decision.

He picks up on the first ring.

“Ri…”

He sounds surprised. But not in a bad way. More like he wasn’t expecting a call from me, so soon.