Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
RACHEL
Isaid yes three times before I realized I hadn’t doublechecked my calendar even once. The problem wasn’t that I was too busy. The problem was that I’d stopped noticing what I was agreeing to.
It hit me standing in my kitchen, coffee cooling in my hand, rain streaking the window like it had somewhere more important to be.
Dominic was arriving in four days.
René had me booked solid through the weekend.
Mischa had assigned a midterm critique.
And I’d told all of them, somehow, that I could make it work.
It wasn’t dramatic. No alarms. No red warnings. Just blocks of color stacked too close together, overlapping until they stopped feeling like plans and started feeling like a puzzle I couldn’t solve.
Green for classes. Blue for shoots. Yellow for edits. Purple for personal.
Purple barely existed anymore.
Not quite trusting my bleary eyes, I zoomed out. Then back in. Like scale might change the math.
I closed the calendar app, waited a beat, then reopened it—because obviously the problem was visual, not structural.
I tried to imagine a version of the week where I just… shifted a few things. Moved the edits later. Combined the commute. Slept less. Ate faster. Multitasked harder.
Then I stared at it like if I waited long enough, the colors would rearrange themselves into something I could win, like a time-saving game of Tetris where the blocks kept falling no matter what I did.
It didn’t.
Even in thumbnail, it still looked impossible.
I closed the app again and told myself I’d fix it later.
I didn’t.
I told myself I’d start with René. Get work stable first. Once that was under control, everything else would fall into place.
It was a comforting lie.
I left my last class early and still arrived at Paris Daily with the vague sense that I was already behind. Every step felt like a small negotiation—what could wait, what couldn’t, what I could pretend not to notice for another hour.
I told myself I just needed to get through the morning. After that, I’d reassess. Rearrange. Make it work.
By the time I reached his office, I was already mentally compressing the rest of the week into smaller and smaller boxes.
René didn’t look up when I walked in.
“You are late,” he said.
“By six minutes,” I replied automatically.
“By six minutes too many.”
I opened my mouth to explain—class ran long even though I left early, the metro stalled, the model developed a sudden cough, the rain—but he lifted one finger.
Not sharply. Not dramatically. Just enough.
René finally looked up from the contact sheets on his desk, glasses pushed low on his nose, expression unreadable in that way that made it impossible to tell whether he was annoyed or simply disappointed.
He didn’t sigh. He didn’t lean back. He just studied me like I was another frame in a sequence he hadn’t decided how to cut yet.
“No,” he said calmly. “You do not justify. You plan.”
The gentle reproof struck deeper than a loud reprimand, because there was nothing in it I could argue with—nowhere I could hide.
“I can still do the shoot,” I said quickly, the sentences tripping over each other as if speed might make them true. “I just need to shift—”
“You’ve already shifted,” he cut in, just as calm. “Twice this week.” He tapped the edge of his desk once, a soft, final sound.
Silence stretched between us—not awkward, not explosive. Like I was a frame he’d paused on and wasn’t sure he liked.
The kind of silence that meant he was already deciding what to cut.
I hadn’t told him about the midterm being moved. Or about Dominic. Or about the favor for Frankie. Or about the extra freelance assignment I’d accepted because it sounded interesting and I didn’t want to look like I couldn’t handle it.
René studied me the way he studied images—head slightly tilted, eyes narrowed, not searching for excuses, just information.
“You are not unreliable,” he said slowly. “But you are becoming… sloppy.”
The word lodged under my ribs.
Sloppy.
I had never been sloppy in my life.
“I can manage it,” I said. Because I needed that to be true more than I needed it to be convincing.
René didn’t argue. He turned slightly in his chair, fingers resting on the edge of his desk like he might already be reaching for another name.
“Perhaps,” he said, almost casually, “this shoot should go to someone with fewer distractions.”
My stomach dropped. “I want it,” I said too quickly.
“I know,” he replied. Not unkindly. Not impressed either. “Wanting is not the same as being available.”
I swallowed. “I’ll make it work.”
René looked at me again—really looked at me this time and his mouth tightened. “Then prove it.”
I left his office with my pulse still too loud in my ears and told myself I’d earned the benefit of the doubt.
The shoot went smoothly, at least on the surface. The light behaved. The model hit her marks. I didn’t miss anything obvious. René said nothing—which I took, stupidly, as a good sign.
I went home late. I fell asleep with my camera bag still by the door. The next morning came too fast.
My phone was already lighting up by the time I rolled onto my side.
Dominic:
3 days. I’m not counting or anything.
Me:
Liar.
Dominic:
Guilty. How did the shoot go?
Me:
Good, I think. Ask me again after coffee.
I stared at the message longer than I meant to, then added:
Me:
I’m excited to see you. Just… fair warning, I might be a zombie.
Dominic:
I’ll take any version of you I can get.
He meant it. I knew that. I adored him for it—and what should have been comforting, instead felt like another promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
By the time I made it to campus, I’d already rehearsed my presentation twice in my head and forgotten half of what I’d planned to say.
Thomas was already there, tapping his pen against his notebook like he was snapping photos rapid fire—or maybe composing a mental symphony. With Thomas it could be either. Noor gave me a small, sympathetic smile as I slid into my seat.
“You look exhausted,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”
“Define okay,” I murmured back.
The room filled in around us. Chairs scraped. Laptops opened. Someone dropped a memory card and swore under their breath. Normal, low-level academic chaos.
Then the door opened.
Mischa didn’t rush. She didn’t need to. She crossed the room with the same measured precision she used when studying an image—hands loose at her sides, posture immaculate, eyes already assessing before she’d even reached the front.
She wore black again. Not dramatic black. Practical black. The kind that made her blend into shadows and stand out against white walls at the same time.
She didn’t greet us.
She set her bag down, placed her notes beside it, and looked up.
Waiting.
Not for us to be silent or to ask permission. No, she was waiting for someone to begin. That someone—today anyway—was me.
My stomach sank.
The photos I brought to Mischa’s critique were fine.
Not bad. Not great. Just… fine.
Which somehow felt worse than failing.
They appeared one by one on the wall—clean, composed, technically solid. The kind of images that looked impressive at first glance and forgettable ten seconds later.
A woman crossing a street at golden hour.
A child laughing mid-motion.
Reflections in glass. Light on stone. Faces caught between expressions.
All perfectly framed moments.
I didn’t say anything. I’d rehearsed my presentation on the way in—talking points, context, intention—but now the words felt thin, like they belonged to someone else’s work. I watched the images instead, trying to see what Mischa was seeing.
She studied them in silence, arms crossed, head tilted slightly to one side like she was listening for something that wasn’t there.
The projector hummed behind her. Too loud. Too steady.
Someone shifted in their chair. Thomas cleared his throat and immediately stopped. Noor’s knee bumped against mine under the desk, a quiet gesture of sympathy I didn’t deserve.
No one spoke.
Not even Mischa.
“These look like someone who is tired,” she said.
The room went very still.
“They are competent,” she continued. “But they are not hungry. They are not curious. They are not risky.”
Thomas stopped tapping his pen.
I wanted to argue.
I wanted to say I was doing night shoots, and internships, and three classes, and—
But it all sounded like excuses even in my head.
Mischa didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.
“You didn’t fail,” she said. “But you left yourself out of them.”
Noor glanced at me, eyes soft.
That somehow hurt more.
But I nodded like I was absorbing it. Like I wasn’t already cataloging everything I’d done wrong this week in a neat little mental spreadsheet.
Tired.
Not hungry. Not curious. Not risky.
It felt unfair. It also felt accurate.
Class ended without ceremony. People packed up quietly, the usual post-critique energy muted, like we’d all agreed not to make too much noise around something fragile.
Noor squeezed my arm on the way out. “Next one,” she said gently.
“Yeah,” I replied, already half gone.
My phone buzzed as I stepped into the hallway.
René:
Where are the raws from this morning?
My stomach dropped.
I’d sent him the previews. The selects. The edited set.
Not the raws.
I pulled my camera out of my bag, fingers moving on muscle memory as I scrolled back through the files—and that’s when I saw it.
The exposure values were wrong.
Not catastrophic. Not unusable.
But off.
ISO too high. Shutter a fraction too slow. A softness that wasn’t artistic, just… imprecise.
The kind of mistake I hadn’t made in years. I stared at the screen, pulse ticking louder in my ears. Same week. Same brain. Same problem.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was doing. It was that I was doing too much of it at once.
My hands slipped on the camera strap when I lifted it, and I had to steady the body against my hip before raising it again.
After a beat, I checked the time.
Missed lunch.
Skipped coffee.
Five new messages I hadn’t opened.
I tightened my grip like that might fix everything.
I told myself I’d eat after the shoot. I meant it. I would eat. I just had to stop by the library first and upload one thing for class.
The real failure came that night.
I was late to René’s shoot.
Not by six minutes.
By twenty-three.
I ran in breathless, rain still clinging to my coat, heart racing, brain stuck somewhere between Mischa’s voice and the echo of my own excuses. The set was already alive—lights calibrated, models in place, assistants moving with quiet efficiency.
And I slid into it like I hadn’t just missed the opening beat.
I set my camera up on autopilot, which was yet another mistake.
Wrong ISO. Wrong white balance. Wrong lens.
I didn’t realize it until René was already watching the test shots appear on the monitor.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even turn fully toward me.
“Stop,” he said.
Flat. Final.
The word cut through the room cleaner than any shout.
Everything froze—the model mid-shift, an assistant’s hand hovering over a light stand, my own fingers still resting on the body of the camera like it might explain itself if I waited.
“What are you doing?” René asked.
Not angry. Not accusing.
Just… genuinely confused.
I looked at the screen and saw it instantly.
Blown highlights where there should have been texture. Edges too soft to trust. Noise crawling through the shadows like static.
Not experimental. Not stylized.
Just wrong.
I’d been moving too fast.
Not thinking. Not checking. Not present.
“I can fix it,” I said, the words coming out thinner than I meant them to.
René finally turned then. “I know you can,” he said. “But I do not understand why I must remind you to be careful.”
His soft, almost puzzled tone raked through me sharper than if he’d yelled at me.
Because he wasn’t disappointed in my skills.
He was disappointed in my attention.
No one spoke after that.
The shoot resumed, but something had shifted—like I’d dropped a note in a piece of music and everyone heard it, even if they kept playing.
The silence wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was professional.
For the first time since I’d started working with him, I had to wonder how I’d earned this spot or if I even was the version of myself René believed in.
My phone buzzed while I was packing up.
Dominic:
In London, at the Ritz. Just booked my train. I’ll be there Thursday morning.
I stared at it.
Thursday.
That was the day of:
A reshoot for Alia.
A late meeting with René.
And the only free evening I’d had in two weeks.
I typed:
So excited to see you.
And immediately hated myself for how true it was.
Because I was excited.
And terrified.
And exhausted.
And I didn’t know where to put him.
Or myself.
I walked home slower than usual.
Paris felt heavier. Louder. Closer.
Everything I loved was pressing in on me.
The work. The city. The people. The future.
All of it.
The worst part of all of it was: I didn’t want to cancel anything.
I didn’t want to give up René.
Or the classes.
Or Dominic.
Or the shoots.
Or Paris.
I wanted all of it.
I just didn’t know how to exist inside it.
There was no villain in my calendar.
Just me.
I dragged myself up the stairs to my apartment, bypassing the open invitation of Alix’s door, then David and Quan’s. Music spilled into the hallway along with laughter and the rich, unbearable smell of food that made my stomach twist.
Once inside my place, I just stood there—in the middle of a life I had asked for—without the first idea of how to live it without breaking something.
Maybe myself.