CHAPTER 2
Theo
Someone had printed the photo four feet wide.
I found it taped to the community hall projector screen — Earl's blurry masterpiece, blown up on six sheets of printer paper and enough packing tape to survive a hurricane.
Mae under the arch, arms up, jaw set, mid-disaster.
Underneath, in Earl's handwriting on a strip of cardboard: HOLD IT TOGETHER, LAUREL CREEK! !!
Three exclamation marks. I counted them while setting up my tripod because if I didn't count punctuation I was going to count the number of people already arguing at nine-oh-two about whether Hold It Together sounded inspirational or like a structural warning.
"It's aspirational," Doris announced from the third row, to no one who had asked.
"It sounds like we're falling apart," said a man with coffee and no patience.
"We are falling apart. That's why the holding matters." Doris pointed at the photo. "Mae understood the assignment."
Not Mae. The photo. The town had already separated her from herself and made a symbol out of the blurry version. That was how Laurel Creek worked: it found the thing you did by accident, named it, posted it, and expected you to be grateful for the branding opportunity.
I took the wide shot anyway. Twenty-three folding chairs. Forty people standing. One enormous paper Mae catching fluorescent glare across her face. Not my image. Not my composition. Not my problem, I told myself, which held for maybe three seconds.
Earl was at the front, taping a second banner to the podium. This one said LAUREL CREEK: WE CATCH WHAT FALLS. He'd used two colors of marker and what looked like a stencil from a child's craft kit.
"Earl," Diane said, coming in with a folder stack and the face of a woman who had already lost to the morning, "that is not the official—"
"Backup slogan," Earl said. "In case the first one polls badly."
"It has not polled at all."
"Exactly. Risky."
I framed him against the banner and got three shots before the room changed. People stopped looking at the photo. They looked at the door.
Mae Lane walked in fast.
Blazer. Clipboard. No headset today, which meant she expected to need both hands for something worse than audio. She scanned the room in one pass: crowd, banner, giant paper version of herself, Earl's tape job, me. Her mouth made one quick decision not to become a smile.
I tracked the decision. The way her lower lip reset. Photographer's habit, I told myself, which was the kind of lie that gets easier with practice.
"Good morning," she said.
Then she looked at the photo. Then at me.
"That's not mine," I said.
"You're photographing it."
"Evidence of civic process."
"The civic process spelled 'together' wrong." She pointed. Earl had written TOGEHTER. "Earl. T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R."
"Artistic choice," Earl said.
Mae crossed the room, pulled the banner down in one smooth motion, folded it, handed it back to him, and kept moving. The whole room watched her do exactly what the photo promised she would do: arrive, fix the visible problem, hold the place together.
And I shot it.
Three frames. Mae mid-stride, folded banner in hand, jaw set, not performing for anyone and therefore impossible not to photograph. Her shoulder lifted when she heard the shutter. A quarter inch. Held. Released.
She'd known where I was without turning. That awareness — hers of me — sat in my sternum and stayed.
I lowered the camera first.
That was new. My hand had moved before I decided to. I didn't care for the implication.
Diane got two sentences into "regional interest" and "genuine opportunity" before Doris lifted her phone.
"Maple Falls posted a drone video," Doris said. "Downtown. String quartet. Teal polos."
Silence.
"They have polos?" someone asked, wounded.
"Team polos," Doris said. "Teal."
Mae did not turn around. "We have a misspelled banner and a four-foot blurry photo taped to a projector screen. So we're pacing ourselves."
The room erupted. Hashtags started from three corners at once. Someone pulled up the Maple Falls post and passed it down the row like evidence in a trial. Earl tried to fix the spelling with a darker marker and made the word look accused.
Diane raised her voice. "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."
That worked. Money still had better crowd control than mayors.
"Community development grant," Diane said quickly, taking the opening. "Small Town of the Year. The committee wants proof of momentum by Friday evening. Five images, one narrative page, one community quote. Forty-eight hours."
Enough information. Too much room reaction. Mae's grip on the clipboard shifted once — knuckles first, then loose again. She'd known the amount already. She'd known and still walked into the room with her face in order.
Doris pointed at the giant photo. "We have momentum. Mae held up the arch. That's our story."
"Better quality, though," Earl said, squinting at his own work. "Theo, you were shooting the whole thing. Don't you have a proper version? A real one?"
The room turned to me.
My thumb went to the zipper on my camera bag before I stopped it.
The card was inside. The better shot. The real one.
Mae under the arch with the petal falling and the light doing something it had no business doing for me on command — the angle of her throat, the exact tension in her wrist, details I'd noticed before I'd noticed the composition.
I knew exactly how that photo would hit.
Earl's version was safe because it was bad: blurry enough to be a joke, crooked enough to belong to the town.
Mine wouldn't be a joke. Mine would make the accident look intentional.
Official. Mae Lane holding up Laurel Creek, sharp enough for the Weekender, the grant deck, every window on Main.
Once that version existed in public, no one would remember the dog. They would remember her.
My first thought was yes.
Use mine.
Let them see it.
I bit the inside of my cheek and adjusted the focus ring on a camera I wasn't raising.
The wanting had too many fingerprints on it: pride, hunger, the ugly little thrill of having the best answer, and the worse thing underneath — wanting Mae to know I saw her like that before the town turned her into a mascot.
The kind of wanting that sits in your hands and makes professionalism a matter of physical effort.
None of that belonged in a community hall. None of it was clean enough to call strategy.
"Editorial review," I said. "Tourism board contract. Not my call what gets released."
A half-truth. Close enough to pass if nobody looked directly at it.
Mae did. One fast glance to my bag, then to my hand still on the focus ring, then back to my face. She knew I had it. She also knew I had chosen not to offer it. Her expression did not thank me. It filed me away for later.
The filing felt physical. A small, precise pressure behind my ribs.
"We work with what we have," she said.
Rescuing me, or protecting herself. Same thing, from across the room.
"And we've got the photographer," Doris said.
"I'm not—"
"Our face and our lens," Doris announced, as if she'd just solved democracy. "Right there."
Mae turned. Not to Doris. To me.
Twenty feet of folding chairs between us, and she still managed to make it feel too close.
"The campaign," Mae said, voice pitched to carry, "is about Laurel Creek. The town. Not one person holding an arch."
"But you did hold the arch," Earl said.
"Because a dog pulled it over. That is not a brand strategy."
"It is a great brand strategy," I said, before common sense arrived. Mae's eyes narrowed. I should have stopped. I did not. "The image works because it's real. You weren't performing. You were reacting. That's what they noticed. Not a committee photo. A moment."
Too much. The words came out with professional edges, but there was no hiding the other thing under them. Not with Mae looking at me like she could see the seam.
"And you'd know," she said, "because you were standing there shooting it instead of helping."
I tightened my hand around the camera until the strap bit into my palm.
"I helped," I said. Too late. Too small.
"You untied the dog. After twelve shots."
"Fourteen."
Why did I say that. Why am I like this. My neck went hot.
The room went quiet in the awful way rooms do when two people become more interesting than the agenda. Mae watched me not answer. Her eyes did not widen. That would have been kinder. They sharpened, like I'd stepped into better focus and she hated the picture she was getting.
She looked at me as if the ugliest part wasn't that I'd taken the shots. It was that she understood why I had.
"Fourteen shots," she repeated. Not angry. Worse — exact. "And then the dog."
"And then the dog," I said.
Nothing else came. I had charm for everything except someone counting my real priorities out loud.
Earl lifted his corrected banner at the exact wrong second. The spelling was fixed. The drawing was worse: a stick figure under a triangular arch, arms raised, wearing a cape.
Mae looked at it. "No."
The tape caught the projector cord when Earl turned. The roller mechanism snapped.
Four feet of blurry Mae came down in a curl of paper and plastic housing, hit the podium, sent Diane's folders sliding, and swung toward the floor. Mae caught it before it took Earl with it.
Chairs scraped. Phones lifted. The rest of the room went soft around the edges.
My hand hit the camera.
Stopped.
Fourteen, her voice said. Not out loud. In my teeth.
If I shot this, she would never forgive me. If I didn't, I would never forgive myself. The ugly part was how even the scales felt.
She looked at me over the fallen screen. Her arms were steady, breath fast from the catch, eyes fixed on me like she was waiting to see which side I chose this time: the image or the person holding it up.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not."
"You're thinking about it."
"I'm always thinking about it. That's the job."
But I reached for the other end of the screen instead.
We lowered it together, slow because the roller was half-sprung and one wrong angle would send it crashing again. Our hands overlapped on the metal frame. Her knuckles against my fingers. Warmth through metal. Neither of us adjusted our grip to make more room.
We set it down. The task was done. My hand stayed.
Hers stayed. I could feel her pulse through the housing, or I invented it because I wanted an excuse not to move.
I wanted to turn my fingers enough to cover hers.
Not for the frame. For me. Which was worse.
My breathing went careful — slower, deliberate — because my hands knew more than I wanted them to.
She didn't pull away first.
I did. Too late to be safe. My fingers kept the shape of her knuckles for three steps.
Because if I stayed there one more second, Doris would have a Facebook post, Mae would have proof, and I would have one less lie available about what I was doing with my hands. I was still thinking about the shot. Her hand under mine. My thumb almost moving. Even this, my brain tried to keep.
Mae straightened her blazer. Once. Then again, same lapel, the one closest to where my fingers had been on the frame. I don't think she knew she did it.
Diane, wisely, spoke before the room could breathe too much meaning into that. "Then it's settled. Mae leads the proof package. Theo handles visuals. Friday evening deadline."
Mae did not look away from me. "Tomorrow morning. Six a.m. Golden hour. We start at the market square and work outward. Bring everything."
The everything landed harder than logistics required. Lenses. Batteries. Tripod. Me. The word sat wrong in my chest.
She caught it. I watched her catch it. For half a second her mouth opened like she was going to qualify it.
She didn't. She let it stand.
"Six a.m.," I said.
"Unless Maple Falls' drone has night vision." Her gaze dropped to the camera at my chest, then came back to my face. "Does it?"
"I'll find out."
"Bring everything, Hart."
Fourteen hours until golden hour. Forty-eight hours to prove the town had a story. And tomorrow morning I would have to stand in early light with Mae Lane close enough to frame honestly and too close to pretend I only wanted the shot. My hand still felt warm on one side.
I put the lens cap on.
It took two tries.