CHAPTER 4
Theo
Diane had the image on screen before I finished sitting down.
Not the laptop. The wall monitor, the one she used for council presentations, the one that made everything six feet wide and impossible to ignore.
The apple crates. The steam. The gold light doing its job.
And at the right edge, Mae's hand on the wood and my shoulder behind it, close enough that the gap between us looked chosen.
I had seen this image on a three-inch camera screen. At six feet, it was a different animal. My shoulder looked like it was reaching for her. I hadn't been reaching. But at this size, the image's argument was more persuasive than mine.
"This opens the proof deck," Diane said.
She was standing, not sitting. Bad sign.
Diane sat for discussions. She stood for decisions.
"Face and lens. Human connection. The committee wants a story, not just Main Street.
" The template was already open behind her.
Diane hadn't reviewed the photograph. She had installed it.
Mae was already in the chair across from me, coffee untouched, posture like she'd been poured from a mold.
She looked at the screen the way a bomb-disposal tech looks at a device — total focus, no expression, everything happening underneath.
A strand of her hair had caught on her collar.
I tracked it for two full seconds before I caught myself.
"The image is strong," I said.
True. Also the dumbest possible thing to lead with, and I knew it half a syllable too late. I'd said it like I would to any client reviewing a proof — the light works, the composition holds — as if this were someone else's campaign. As if my shoulder weren't on the wall behind me.
Mae's eyes flicked to me. Fast. Not angry. Worse — measuring.
Diane tapped her tablet. "I need a caption and signed releases from both of you by eleven.
The proof deck goes to the regional committee at noon, and this image leads.
I also need a companion shot — street-level, town-facing, less intimate.
Something that says the same thing louder and with more bunting. "
"Both of us," Mae said. Not a question.
"You're in the image. He's in the image.
Campaign ethics require releases from identifiable subjects.
" Diane said it the way she said everything — like the information was a bus and you could get on or get run over.
"I'll draft the caption. You two approve it by ten thirty.
Companion image from Main Street by eleven. Start walking."
The meeting was forty-five seconds old and Diane was already finished with it.
"The caption," Mae said. "What does it say?"
Diane read from her tablet without inflection. "'Laurel Creek's story starts before the town wakes up. Market coordinator Mae Lane and photographer Theo Hart at first light — the face and the lens behind the bid.'"
Silence.
"She just turned my job into a meet-cute," Mae said. "I'm not doing that for a grant committee."
"You're approving it by ten thirty," Diane said.
"With edits, if they are useful and not emotional.
The committee responds to human-interest framing.
You two at sunrise with apple crates is more convincing than anything Maple Falls is going to pull off with a drone.
" She picked up her bag. "Ten thirty. Eleven.
Noon. I'll be at the town office if you need me, but I won't need you, so let's keep it clean. "
She left. The monitor stayed on. My shoulder stayed on the wall, six feet wide and getting more uncomfortable by the second.
Mae stood, collected her coffee, and walked out without looking at the screen. I followed, because the alternative was sitting alone in a room with a giant photograph of my own shoulder, which felt like a punishment I hadn't earned yet.
Main Street at eight fifteen was already doing its morning thing — delivery trucks, Hendersons' kid sweeping the sidewalk, the sandwich board outside the coffee stand advertising something aggressively seasonal.
Across the street, the coffee-stand woman clocked us walking out of Diane's building together and pretended not to. She was terrible at pretending.
Mae walked half a step ahead of me, which was a pace that said we are working, not walking together, and I recognized it because I'd used it on clients.
"The caption's not wrong," I said.
"The caption is efficient. That doesn't make it innocent."
"It turns the job into something the committee can picture."
She stopped outside the print shop, wide front window on one side, community bulletin board on the other. The look she gave me was the one I'd seen her use on Earl when he brought duct tape to a structural problem — patient, precise, and entirely out of patience.
"You keep saying 'the image works' like that's the end of the sentence. It works for the campaign. It also works against the part where I have vendor contracts, street permits, and a budget to defend. Diane is making the first thing they learn about me a sunrise caption."
I didn't have a good answer for that.
"That's fair," I said.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Agree too fast. You agreed with me about the test frame too, and then you sold me the wide version anyway."
That landed. She was keeping score, and her math was better than mine.
The print-shop door opened and Gus leaned out, holding a roll of banner vinyl and a measuring tape. "Mae. I've got the festival banners ready for pickup — office or poles?"
"Poles. South end first, work north." Mae's voice shifted — campaign lead, no static, total authority. "And Gus, if Earl comes in with any hand-drawn signage, lose it."
"Earl was already here." Gus jerked his thumb toward the community board in the window. "Left you something."
We both looked.
Pinned to the board, center position, printed on actual photo paper — not by Gus, which meant Earl had access to a printer and opinions — was the apple-crate image.
Not the uncropped version. The crop: crates, steam, light.
But Earl had added a handwritten label in Sharpie on a strip of masking tape:
FACE & LENS — LAUREL CREEK'S BEST ANGLE. <3
The heart was colored in. Thoroughly.
Mae made a sound. Not a word — several words denied clearance. She unpinned the photo, peeled off Earl's label, folded it once, and put it in her jacket pocket. Four seconds. Efficient. Brutal.
"That's not sanctioned," she said to Gus.
"Didn't figure." Gus went back inside. The banner vinyl bumped the doorframe.
"You kept it," I said.
"I confiscated it."
"You folded it. Into your pocket."
"Evidence," she said, and started walking again, faster now.
I caught up. The sidewalk narrowed past the print shop — old Laurel Creek infrastructure, built for two people who liked each other or one person with a stroller — and for about thirty feet we were shoulder to shoulder with no room to drift apart without one of us stepping into the street.
Her sleeve brushed mine every other step. Neither of us had enough sidewalk to make it clean or accidental. She smelled like cold coffee and printer toner and the warmth of standing too close.
"We need the companion shot," I said. Because we did. Diane's deadline was real, and the proof deck wasn't going to wait for us to finish having a problem.
"Fine. What do you need?"
"Something street-level. Activity. Town in motion. The opposite of intimate." I looked down the block — banner poles, sandwich boards, seasonal bunting strung too low across the crosswalk. "I can shoot vendor row from the north end. You don't have to be in it."
"I'll be in it anyway. I'm on every corner of this street by nine o'clock. You can't shoot Main Street without catching me in the background whether either of us likes it."
She was right again. Removing Mae from the campaign was like photographing a kitchen and cropping out the stove.
We reached the south end of Main Street, where the banner poles waited and the first vendor was unloading crates from a truck. Mae took the banner roll from Gus's delivery stack. I took the other end because it was twelve feet of stiff vinyl and physics required a second person.
Not because I wanted an excuse to stand close to her.
The banner read LAUREL CREEK — SMALL TOWN, BIG STORY, which Diane had clearly written and which Mae clearly had not approved, based on the way her jaw did something structural when she read it.
"Big story," she said flatly.
"It's not about us."
"Right now everything is about us." She pulled the first grommet hook through. "Diane knows exactly what she's doing. She isn't asking whether we're useful. She's already spending us."
The wind caught the vinyl. Mae braced. I braced. The banner snapped hard enough to jerk both of us forward, her weight pulling south and mine pulling north. One grommet stuck halfway through the hook.
"Hold tension," she said.
"Holding."
"Just hold it."
A vendor rolled a dolly past behind me. I shifted to give him room, the vinyl yanked, and Mae stepped in without thinking. Her hand landed over mine on the pole — warm, callused, no hesitation. The contact went up my arm and sat in my ribs.
For one impossible second, I felt her pulse kick once against the back of my hand and wondered how long we could pretend this was still about the banner. Her thumb shifted. A millimeter. Involuntary. My whole body registered it. Mae's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly.
Then one more, because the grommet still hadn't caught and neither of us could let go without dropping the banner.
"Don't let go," she said, low.
"I wasn't."
The grommet caught.
I should have taken my hand back first. I didn't. For one ridiculous half-second, I wondered what would happen if neither of us moved.
Mae moved.
Fast enough to save us both. Not fast enough to pretend there had been nothing to save.
The banner lurched again. This time it twisted around the pole, dragging the loose end sideways and yanking Mae off balance.
Someone near the coffee stand called, "Theo, that's a shot!"
It was.