4. Teddy
TEDDY
WAITING FOR A SUBJECT THAT HASN’T ENTERED THE FRAME
The saying “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—or some version of that sentimental crap—has been stuck in my head all day.
Except this isn’t about love, it’s about photography.
It’s about the possibility that I already had the thing that mattered most and somehow lost it.
That thought terrifies me more than I’d like to admit.
It’s a slow-building pressure behind my ribs, tightening a little more every day.
The woods are quiet, but not silent. Leaves rustle overhead. Birds call somewhere deeper among the trees. A branch creaks in the distance. Everything feels muted, as if someone turned the volume down on the world.
Late afternoon sunlight filters through the canopy, washing everything in gold.
It’s the kind of light photographers spend hours chasing.
The kind of light I used to chase. I raise the camera and take the shot.
When I look at the image, I already know what I’m going to find.
The exposure is perfect, the composition balanced.
The light cuts through the trees exactly the way it should.
Yet I feel absolutely nothing.
A bird breaks from the canopy above me, startling in the quiet. I watch it catch a thermal and dance freely in the sky.
I scroll through the rest of the photographs I’ve taken today. A crooked mailbox. Fog hanging over a field. Light catching the autumn leaves. Technically they’re excellent. The sort of photographs that built my career. The sort of photographs clients still pay ridiculous amounts of money for.
Not a single image makes my pulse quicken. Not one feels important.
I used to know before I even pressed the shutter.
I’d see something and feel it immediately, like a hook catching beneath my ribs and pulling me toward it.
Photography wasn’t something I did back then, it was something I couldn’t stop myself from doing.
Now it feels like I’m going through the motions of someone else’s life.
It would be different if the work was bad. I could fix bad. I could change the angle, find better light, choose a stronger subject. There are solutions for bad photographs. There aren’t many solutions for staring at your best work and realizing it no longer means anything to you.
Everyone assumes burnout looks dramatic.
A breakdown. A public collapse. Some spectacular explosion that leaves obvious damage behind.
This isn’t that. It’s stealthier. It’s waking up every morning, hoping the passion will come back and going to sleep wondering if it ever will.
It’s looking at work people call exceptional and feeling absolutely nothing in return.
I want to want it again. That’s the whole thing.
I want to pick up my camera and feel excited.
I want to see something ordinary and get that spark—the spark that tells me it matters.
I want to stop wondering whether I’ve spent my entire adult life building a career around something that’s already slipping away from me.
Boudica Springs wasn’t part of some grand plan to recapture that.
No, I chose it because it was far enough away that nobody knew my name.
Far enough away that I could figure out whether photography was still mine.
So far, I haven’t. Well, except my first day.
Not for the first time since I met Dannica in the diner, do I wish I’d had my camera on me.
The thought is ridiculous. I’ve spent two weeks chasing perfect light through forests and fields, and somehow the most interesting thing I’ve seen since arriving in Boudica Springs was a beautiful waitress rattling off headlines under her breath as she poured coffee.
The memory slams into me—her mid-sentence, mid-expression, something shifting across her face like she’s following a thought the rest of us can’t quite see or watching a story unfold in real time and just… reacting to it.
I didn’t register it properly then. Not the way I should have. But now it won’t leave me alone.
If I’d had my camera, maybe I could’ve pinned it down.
Caught that exact moment where everything lined up—whatever it is that makes her…
her. Maybe I could’ve felt it again too.
That instinct, that certainty. The thing I used to trust without thinking.
Instead, all I have is the memory. Blurry in the wrong places, too sharp in others.
And the quiet, gnawing thought that even if I’d had the shot, I might not have known what to do with it.
Back at my apartment, my phone buzzes. My breath catches as my agent’s name flashes across the screen. I groan. “Fuck! Of course.”
I answer, even though I know I’m making a huge mistake.
“Teddy, my man!” Rick’s voice bursts through, all sunshine and sales pitch. It grates on what feels like my exposed nerves. “You’re a difficult man to get on the phone.”
I close my eyes, pressing my thumb harder into the side of the phone than necessary.
“Hey, Rick.”
“How’s the… retreat?” he asks, like he’s talking about a luxury spa instead of a tiny apartment on the outskirts of nowhere.
“Quiet.”
“Love that for you. Big fan of quiet. Very… grounding.” A beat. “So listen, I’ve got three people asking when you’re back. One of them used the phrase ‘career-defining.’ No pressure.”
I huff out a laugh, staring at my computer screen. “That’s usually code for ‘sell your soul but make it glossy.’”
Rick chuckles like I’m joking, but I’m not.
“Come on, man. You’re the best in the game. You don’t need to go all… Eat, Pray, Whatever This Is. You’ve got it. You’ve always had it.”
Rows and rows of photos stare back at me. Perfect but empty.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s kind of the problem?—”
He talks right over me.
“You’re Teddy—” He cuts himself off, rebrands mid-sentence. “You’re that guy. People don’t book you for introspection. They book you because you deliver.”
There it is. Deliver. Like I’m a service. Like this, this thing that used to feel like oxygen, is just a transaction now.
Rick’s tone turns practiced, careful. “The gallery’s asking questions. I can keep buying you time, Teddy, maybe a month, but not forever. The industry moves fast. If you’re not careful, people stop waiting.”
Translation: we will replace you.
“Got it,” I say.
“Attaboy. Knew you would. You’re the shit, Teddy. Always have been.”
The line clicks dead, and I lower the phone slowly.
Five years ago, hearing those words would’ve meant something. Back then, being told I was the best would’ve been validation that all the long hours, the travel, and the sacrifices were worth it. Now it just feels like a trap.
People don’t book me because they connect with my work anymore.
They book me because they know I’ll deliver.
Because I’m reliable, consistent. A safe investment.
Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe somewhere along the way I stopped being a photographer and became a product.
I set the phone down carefully. For the first time since arriving in Boudica Springs, the idea of going back to LA doesn’t make me feel relieved.
It makes me feel exhausted. I sit with that for a moment.
Outside, a car passes slowly on the empty road.
I don’t touch the camera for the rest of the day. Instead, I grab my laptop and scroll through my previous campaigns. Faces that were anonymous but now grace every billboard in LA. Shots people called iconic. I remember taking them, remember the rush and instinct.
Because I haven’t beaten myself up enough today, I take one of my older scenic shots and compare it to today’s. My instincts aren’t wrong. Today’s image is empty, just a bunch of pixels that happen to look like an image of a tree against the sky.
Meaningless. Except, like most things over the last two weeks, it takes me back to the diner, to the waitress with eyes the same deep cerulean as the sky this morning. It makes me want to go back and talk to her, get lost in her eyes again and her easy conversation.
Five-minute drive. Coffee. Conversation.
Easy. Maybe too easy. But that defeats the point, doesn’t it?
Which is exactly what I shouldn’t be doing.
I remind myself for the tenth time today that I didn’t come here to find people, I came here to fix what’s broken.
Which makes my inability to stop thinking about Dannica more than a little inconvenient.
I lean back, dragging a hand through my hair.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Great plan. Isolation. Really working out for you.”
Silence stretches out around me. I feel like I’ve imposed my own solitary confinement. Well, I have, haven’t I?
Maybe I need to get multiple cats. Call them all Thing One, Thing Two, etc. And when I go stir crazy and start making wigs out of noodles, they can all band together and put me out of my misery.
Right, that’s it. Even though I’ve only been back in my apartment for a few hours, I’m already stir crazy. I need to get out. I grab my jacket.
“Yeah, we’re going outside for a walk before this gets weird. Weirder, I mean.”
The road is narrow, quiet, and endless. The kind you find in low-budget horror movies where the new guy in town suddenly becomes the town scarecrow.
I’m contemplating turning back when I spot a middle-aged woman in a business suit, her hair in a perfect bun, holding her phone in the air as if summoning a signal from the almighty.
She looks like one of those Stepford Wives.
I slow down. “Uh… excuse me, are you okay?”
She spins toward me. “Oh, thank heavens! I was starting to think I’d die out here.”
I glance around. It’s a road, not the Sahara. Then I remember it was just a few moments ago that I was starting to draft the first lines of a psychological horror.
“Anything I can help with?”
“I have a flat tire,” she says, lowering her voice like it’s a scandal. “And there’s no reception.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Isn’t that always the way?”
She blinks at me. All right.
“Where’s the car?”
“Just around the bend.” She points at it with her cellphone.
I nod. “Let me take a look.”
I fall into step beside her as she starts talking. And… doesn’t stop.
She chats the whole way to the car, which, to be fair, is only a short walk, but still she has impressive stamina.
She tells me about her dogs. One of them had to have three teeth pulled, and the other sleeps with his ball in his mouth like a pacifier.
I’m about to offer myself as a sacrifice to the scarecrow gods when her cherry-red BMW X5 comes into view.
She preens when she sees her “made it” car.
Where I come from, people buy their kids this as a starter car when they first learn to drive, only to upgrade them to a G-Wagon six months later.
There’s something almost… fascinating about the disconnect. The way she carries herself like she’s top of the food chain, like this is peak success. Not that I say any of that.
She starts telling me how her husband got a promotion, and her daughter got a great job that got her out of the sleepy town, so the car was an empty-nest present.
I just nod where it feels appropriate and let her keep going, because cutting her off would take more energy than I’m willing to spend right now.
Still, there’s something about the tone, the cadence, the way she fills every second of silence like it’s something to be avoided at all costs.
It reminds me a little too much of LA. If I wasn’t already halfway committed to helping her, I’d probably find a polite way to excuse myself. But I am, so I don’t.
“Do you have a spare?”
The look she gives me says I may as well have asked if she’s carrying the cure for cancer.
“I don’t know?”
“Okay,” I say. “Pop the trunk.”
A couple of minutes later, I’m crouched beside the car.
“Hand me that?” I say, nodding toward the jack.
I start loosening bolts. The motion comes easy, automatic like muscle memory.
For a second, I’m not here. I’m back in a cramped garage, the air thick with oil and heat, my dad leaning over my shoulder.
“Don’t force it. You’ll strip it. Feel it first.”
That’s what he always said when I tried to muscle my way through.
I adjust my grip without thinking. Right, there it is. The bolt loosens cleanly. I huff out a quiet breath. There’s a shift in my chest, small and almost unnoticeable.
“I’m Beverly, by the way.”
“Mm-hmm.” I stiffen and wait for the inevitable question of reciprocation, but she’s so involved in her own stories she doesn’t think to ask. Thankfully. But then…
“You’re not from here.”
“Nope.”
“I knew it. You’ve got that… look.”
I glance up. “What look?”
She smiles.
“Dangerously handsome with a voice that should come with a warning label.”
I freeze. “A warning label?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she says. “You sound like one of those narrators. You know. The ones in those very inappropriate audiobooks.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. “I haven’t been privy to those audiobooks yet. So, I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Mm-hmm,” she says, delighted. “Their voices are always deep and smooth. Slightly sinful. Honestly, if you asked me to do something questionable, I’d probably agree before thinking it through.”
Alrighty. I tighten the last bolt. “Is that so?” I mutter because what else do I say?
I stand, wiping my hands on my jeans.
“Tire’s good.”
She beams like I just performed a miracle. “You’re a lifesaver. You must come to the harvest festival as thanks.”
“I’m good,” I say automatically.
“Oh, nonsense. The whole town will be there. Food, music. My daughter, Peyton, needs a bit of convincing, but she might come home for the festival. She’s gorgeous, by the way. You could meet her.”
“Noted.” I’m honestly stumped for anything else to say. I could literally be a serial killer and this woman is pimping me out to her daughter.
“And there’s a masquerade,” she adds, almost as an afterthought.
That makes me pause.
“A masquerade?”
“Yes!” she says. “Everyone wears masks. It’s a whole thing. You’re not supposed to recognize anyone. It’s very exciting.”
I tilt my head. A disguise. No expectations. I doubt I’d be recognized in this small town, but it’s good to know that possibility could be completely eliminated. No one would know who I am. Or expect me to deliver.
“Huh.”
She smiles like she’s just won and hops in the front seat. “You want a ride?” I can’t miss the double entendre. Interesting, she’s trying to set me up with her daughter and still flirts with me. I wonder if it’s a small-town thing.
“Nah, I’m good. Thank you. Don’t forget to get the flat repaired.”
She waves a hand and giggles. “That’s what husbands are for, right?”
I smile instead of shaking my head. This is getting even more interesting.
“I’ll see you at the festival, then?” She doesn’t wait for my answer.
I watch her drive off, then look down the empty road. That was something.
Maybe the festival isn’t a bad idea.