"Perfect. Don't move."
I'm talking to a tree, specifically to the way the light is hitting the oak branch through the iron fence right now , golden and low and exactly right , and I have maybe three minutes before the angle dies so I'm not wasting them on self-awareness.
I press my lens through the gap in the bars, adjust, and shoot.
Two weeks I've been coming to this exact spot. The estate on the other side is old money and older stone, the kind of property that doesn't belong in the city anymore, I don't care about the property. I care about that oak and what the six o'clock light does to it. I've gotten some of the best frames of my entire semester standing right here.
"You're on my property."
I spin.
My camera swings hard on the strap and I catch it with both hands on pure reflex, stumble, don't fall. My heart is in my throat before I've fully turned around.
The man standing six feet away looks like he grew there.
Tall, dark suit, no tie, hands in his pockets, sharp jaw, pale grey eyes, the kind that catch the same light I've been chasing, which feels unfair. He's not blinking enough, he's not angry either, which would've been easier to deal with. He's just looking at me the way people look at problems they have all the time in the world to solve.
His gaze drops to my camera bag. There's a luggage tag on the zipper pull, my name, my number, my email, because I lost a lens once and learned my lesson. He looks at it for exactly one second, then back at my face. Something moves in his expression and disappears before I can read it.
He doesn't tell me to leave.
Instead he looks at the angle I was shooting, the gap in the fence, the branch I was after, and says, "The branch on the left gives better light than the one you were using."
Then, "You're still trespassing."
I stare at him. He just gave me something and then took the ground back in the same breath, and I genuinely cannot decide which part to respond to first.
"I'm sorry," I say. Mostly sincere. "I'll go."
I collect my bag from the ground. I have my equipment, I have my dignity, mostly, and I turn and walk toward the gap in the fence.
I took four steps.
The problem is I can't just leave, I've never been able to. Lena calls it my worst quality, I call it honesty.
I stop. I turn back.
"The left branch is technically better," I say. "But it's obvious. I was shooting the difficult one."
I leave before he can answer.
I don't look back, I refuse to look back, but I feel it, the specific weight of being watched the entire way down the path, and I walk a little straighter because of it, which I'm not going to examine.
>>>
My apartment smells like chaos before I even open the door.
"Sit on this," Caden calls from his bedroom.
I drop my bag and follow his voice, my brother is on his knees in front of a suitcase that has clearly lost the argument with its own contents, forcing things in with the single-minded focus of a man who did not start packing until twenty minutes ago.
"Your flight is in two weeks," I say.
"Got moved up." He doesn't look at me. "Sit on the suitcase, Wren."
I sit, he zips it around me while I throw my weight on the lid, and we've done this enough times that we don't have to talk through it.
"How moved up?"
"Thursday."
"Caden. It's Tuesday."
"I'm aware."
He gets the zipper closed. Sits back on his heels and looks up at me with the specific expression he gets when he's working out how to say something I'm not going to like. Warm brown eyes. Our mother's eyes. The face I've been reading my whole life.
"I asked Rhett to check on you while I'm gone," he says.
I stare at him. "Rhett Calloway."
"He's two minutes away."
"Your terrifying, emotionally deceased best friend."
"He'll keep you safe."
I open my mouth, close it. Because what I want to say is 'I don't need keeping safe, I'm twenty-two, I live with Lena, I'm fine', but what I'm actually thinking is something I'm not ready to say out loud.
I don't know what to do with that. So I'm going to pretend I don't have it.
"Joel's been at the studio," Caden says.
The name lands like cold water.
"What?"
"He came twice last week, stood outside for forty minutes the second time." Caden's voice is flat now, careful. "He asked the building coordinator which class was yours, there's a log."
I don't say anything. Joel is my ex, has been for eight months and not behaving like it.
"Wren."
"I know."
"Let Rhett "
"I said I know."
The front door opens, Lena appears in the hallway, drops her bag, reads the room in under three seconds, and sits down on the bed next to Caden. "I'm on his side," she tells me.
"You don't even know what it is yet."
"You have your arguing face on. I'm against you automatically."
I don't win the argument.
>>>
Caden's car pulls out at midnight.
Lena and I stand in the open doorway and watch the tail lights turn the corner. The apartment behind us is quiet in the way it only gets when someone who belongs in it is gone.
"He'll be fine," Lena says.
"I know." I cross my arms against the cold. "I hate it anyway."
We go inside, I edit photos until two, eat cereal I don't taste, go to bed.
I wake at 3:14 a.m. with my hand pressed flat against the mattress.
The dream again, same shape it's always had since i can remember things, a dark hallway, the smell of old wood burning and something chemical underneath that turns my stomach even now. My own voice, very small, saying a name I can never hold onto once I'm awake, and water, always the water, close and cold, just out of sight, the sound of it locking up my chest in a way nothing else does.
The water is always the same distance away. I have never once dreamed what's in it.
I lie there until the grey light comes through the curtains and the city starts doing its morning thing and my hands stop shaking.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
Unknown number. One text.
"You left your lens cap on my side of the fence, the left branch. You were right that it was harder."