24. Atticus
ATTICUS
Icheck the settings on my Leica twice, then a third time, despite the morning light being perfectly consistent. It’s a nervous tick I haven't succumbed to in a decade. Behind me, the espresso machine in the hotel lobby hisses, a vivid contrast to the quiet hum of the early Roman morning.
Baleigh appears at the top of the stairs, smoothing out an orange sundress that makes her look like a piece of the sun itself. She offers a hesitant smile, the kind that acknowledges the heavy air still lingering from her talks with Max and Amos.
"You're remarkably light on logistics today," she says, stopping a few feet away. She tilts her head, her eyes searching mine—those eyes that seem to change color with every shift of the wind. "No tripod? No shot list?"
"Not today." I shift the weight of my camera bag, my palms uncharacteristically damp. "I want to show you something. Somewhere. It’s close to a five hour trek outside the city, and the train leaves in twenty minutes."
She bites her lip, a habit I’ve grown far too fond of documenting. "Is it for the feature?"
"No." The word comes out blunter than I want it to. I soften my tone, stepping into her space until I can smell the faint, floral scent of her shampoo. "It’s just for us. It’s a place I’ve never taken anyone from the program. Not even Amos. I’d like you to see it."
I wait for the rejection, for her to tell me she needs a day to process everything that’s shifting between the four of us. Instead, she reaches out and brushes a stray thumb against my wrist.
"Okay," she whispers. "Lead the way, Atticus."
The train ride is a blurred montage of olive groves and silver-green hills falling away to the jagged coastline. By the time we step onto the salt-crusted platform, the air has changed. It’s cooler here, sharp with the aroma of brine and drying nets.
We’ve arrived in a village where the houses are stacked like a child’s discarded blocks—terracotta, ochre, and sun-bleached pink clinging to cliffs that dive straight into the turquoise throat of the Mediterranean.
"Beautiful doesn't seem like a big enough word," Baleigh says, leaning against a stone railing as we climb the winding path toward the harbor.
I don't look at the view. I look at her. "I came here ten years ago. Right after I decided I wasn't going back to the States."
I lead her past a small shrine tucked into a limestone niche, toward a crumbling stone bench overlooking the bobbing blue fishing boats.
This isn't just a location I’ve scouted.
It’s the place where I stopped running and finally started existing.
Baleigh watches a group of old men playing cards in the shade of a lemon tree, her expression turning from wonder to a quiet, profound realization.
She feels the weight of the history buried in the cobblestones under our feet.
"This is where it started for you," she says, sounding breathless. "Isn't it?"
"Ciao, Atticus! Un corretto?"
The owner of Bar del Porto leans out from behind a chrome machine, waving a stained rag.
I raise a hand in greeting, but keep moving.
Every fifty paces, the rhythm repeats. A woman shaking out a rug from a balcony calls down a greeting; the man repairing a wooden hull near the slipway asks if I’ve finally come back to help him with the nets.
Baleigh’s pace slows. She watches a silver-haired woman press a small parcel of wax-papered biscotti into my hand without me asking.
"You said you didn't have a home," she says, voice echoing off the narrow, salt-damped walls of the alleyway. "But they know you. They know your coffee order. They know which boat you like."
"I’m a recurring character, Baleigh. That’s all.
" I guide her up a set of stairs carved directly into the cliff face, the stone worn smooth by centuries of sandals.
"I show up twice a year, stay a week, write a piece that brings them more tourists, and then I vanish. It’s familiarity, not belonging. "
"Does it feel different to you?" she asks. "Being the ghost in the machine?"
I don't answer until we reach the crest, a jagged limestone lip where the wind whips the salt into our lungs. We sit on the edge, legs dangling over a three-hundred-foot drop into the churning surf. I set my camera on the grass between us. I don’t feel like reaching for it.
"I left home because I was supposed to be a lawyer," I say, watching a gull bank against the thermal. "My father had the firm picked out. The desk. The wife. Every time I looked at that life, I felt like I was suffocating."
I pick up a loose pebble and toss it. It disappears into the blue.
"So I ran. I convinced myself it was for the art.
For the 'truth' of the experience. But the truth is, it’s easier to be interesting for seventy-two hours than it is to be a partner for seventy-two years.
Every time someone got too close, an assignment coincidentally opened up in Morocco. Or Prague. Or here."
I turn to look at her, the luminous highlights in her hair dancing in the gale.
"I've spent so much time avoiding being known. But today, standing in that square... I realized I’m tired of being a guest in other people’s lives."
The wind tries to swallow my words, but I force them out. It’s like lancing an old wound I’ve kept bandaged in expensive leather and high-grade lenses.
"There was a winter in Reykjavik," I say, the memory tasting like stale coffee and cold iron. "It was my thirtieth birthday. I sat in a terminal for fourteen hours because of a blizzard, watching families reunite at the gate. My only celebration was a text from my editor about a deadline and a pre-packaged sandwich. I’ve woken up in fifty different boutique hotels this year, Baleigh, and sometimes I have to check the stationery on the nightstand just to remember which language I’m supposed to use for 'thank you. '"
I stare down at my hands. They’re steady—I’ve trained them to be—pointing the lens at the tragedies and triumphs of strangers. But inside, I feel the structural integrity of my "freedom" failing.
"Amos and I, we’re the same," I continue, my voice tight.
"We trade stability for postcards. I have a contact list that spans six continents, but if I died in my sleep tonight, it would take three days for anyone to realize I wasn't just 'off the grid' for a shoot. I’ve built a life that’s wide, but it’s thin as a sheet of paper. There’s no weight to it. No anchor."
Baleigh doesn’t pull away. She doesn't offer the pity I’ve spent years dodging. She shifts closer, her arm pressing against mine, providing a steady heat against the sea spray.
"You talk about running as if it’s a failure, Atticus," she says.
She reaches out, her fingers catching the edge of my sleeve, grounding me to the cliffside.
"But you aren't just running away. You're searching. You’ve been looking for a place where you don't have to keep your bags packed by the door. You’re not a ghost. You’re just someone who’s been waiting for a reason to finally stay. "
Her words cut through the romanticized fog of my life.
She sees the exhaustion I’ve been masking with "adventure.
" I’ve spent my career capturing the essence of a place in a single frame, but she just captured the essence of me with a single sentence.
I feel stripped bare, my carefully curated walls reduced to rubble by a girl from a small town who isn't afraid of the quiet.
"I didn't think anyone was paying that much attention," I admit, the confession raw in my throat.
"I’m always paying attention," she whispers.
The sun begins its slow, bruised descent, staining the Mediterranean the color of a hammered gold coin.
Down on the concrete slipway, Baleigh stands near a tangle of cerulean nets.
She’s gesturing wildly at a fisherman whose face is a map of deep, sun-etched canyons.
He’s holding up a bucket of glistening calamari, shouting something in a dialect so thick it’s practically another language, and Baleigh is laughing—that bright, unencumbered sound that seems to peel back the layers of my skepticism.
She doesn't speak a word of Italian beyond grazie and prego, yet she has him grinning, mime-acting the way the squid pulse in the water. She’s a light source. People gravitate toward her not because she’s a tourist with a camera, but because she’s present.
I stand on the upper terrace, my Leica hanging heavy and forgotten against my chest. Usually, this is the part where I’d be checking my watch, calculating the walk back to the station and the editing hours waiting for me in Florence.
I’d be thinking about the next flight, the next coast, the next temporary room with its sterile, white sheets.
Instead, I find myself imagining a Tuesday.
A mundane, unremarkable Tuesday in a house with a permanent bookshelf.
I see her in a kitchen that actually belongs to us, the scent of espresso mingling with the salt air from an open window.
I see a life where I’m not documenting the world from the outside, but finally participating in it from the heart of it.
The realization hits me with the force of a shore-break. I do not want to be the man who leaves. Don’t want to be the guy who sends postcards from one corner of the world to a woman I’m terrified of losing. I need to be the one who clears the table while she tells me about her day.
Baleigh looks up then, spotting me on the ridge. She waves the fisherman’s cap she was somehow allowed to try on, her face glowing in the amber light.
"Atticus! He says the sea is angry tonight, but the catch is good!" she shouts, her voice carrying over the crashing surf.
I don’t care about the sea. I don't care about the assignment. I just want to memorize the way she looks in this specific light, not for a magazine, but for the rest of my life. The horizon doesn't look like an escape route. It looks like home, as long as she's standing in the foreground.