His Lens Never Had Room For Me Chapter 02

His Lens Never Had Room For Me Chapter 02

Early the next morning, Everett tossed an envelope onto the dining table.

“The publisher wants twenty selected shots for a special feature in the monograph. Pick them from the hard drive for me.”

“I’m picking them?”

“Didn’t you study a little photography before? You understand composition and lighting well enough. I have to coordinate with the awards committee these next two days, so I don’t have time.”

I opened the hard drive.

There were more than three hundred photos in the candidate folder.

Every single one of them featuring Sienna.

There were no star trackers, no star charts, just her.

Sienna wrapped in a sleeping bag, watching the sunrise from the entrance of a tent.

Sienna crouched by a stream, washing her hands, her profile outlined beautifully by the morning light.

Every single frame had been meticulously color-graded.

I had studied photography, so I knew.

All three hundred of those photos had been taken with endless affection.

I had been with Everett for five years, and he had never taken a single photo of me.

He said his lens didn’t shoot portraits.

Only stars.

I spent two hours selecting the twenty photos with the most perfect composition.

Everett came out of his home studio and flipped through them. “Not bad. The angles are close to what I had in mind.”

He picked up the hard drive and headed for the door, then added, “Oh, and each photo in the monograph needs a caption. Write those too. Sienna isn’t good with words.”

I was supposed to personally write captions for twenty beautiful and intimate portraits of another woman.

“Okay.”

I heard my own voice come out calm.

He closed the door.

I opened the first photo.

It had been taken on a high plateau at four degrees below zero. Sienna stood in the snow.

Everett had put his own heated gloves on her hands, and she smiled like a quick, bright deer.

I looked at those hands. Then I slowly lowered my eyes to my own right hand.

The joints of my index and middle fingers were swollen and misshapen, marked by two dark purple frostbite scars that would never fade.

Four winters ago, deep in the Denali backcountry during a twenty-two-below-zero blizzard.

So Everett wouldn’t miss a rare meteor shower, I had dug with my bare hands through knee-deep snow to find the backup batteries that had been buried.

The wind and snow were too strong. I slipped and fell, and instinctively, my phone screen lit up.

The faint light lasted only one second.

Everett rushed over from more than a dozen yards away and shouted at me in fury.

“Do you even understand what zero light pollution means? I waited four hours for that composition, and you ruined all of it!”

I sat in the snow, both hands so frozen I had lost all sensation.

The nerve damage never fully healed.

I placed my hands back on the keyboard.

Looking at Sienna’s smiling face on the screen, I typed the first caption.

[In the stillness of the frozen wastes, she was the only color more precious than the stars.]

When I typed those words, I felt no grievance at all.

Only absurdity.

Only something almost laughable.

The master who had treated absolute darkness as his lifelong faith now wanted to announce to the world, in the plainest language possible, that he had been conquered by one cheap spark of light pollution.

Fine.

I would give him exactly what he wanted.

I would make sure that hypocritical line was printed forever in his personal monograph.

Those twenty captions were the footnotes I wrote, as someone who truly understood photography, for his ridiculous belief.

Late that night, after I finished all twenty captions and sent them to Everett, he replied with only one word:

[Fine.]

I smiled, closed the document, and opened my email.

[I accept your offer. The earliest I can arrive in Fairbanks to report for duty is the fifteenth.]

There were seven days left until the fifteenth.