2. Elias
ELIAS
The woman has been in my house for eleven minutes and she has already rearranged my kitchen.
Not dramatically—she hasn't moved furniture or reorganized cabinets—but when I come back downstairs after changing into dry clothes, I find her standing at the counter with a dish towel draped over one shoulder, the electric kettle running, and two mugs pulled from a cabinet she had no business opening.
She looks up when I walk in and doesn't appear remotely apologetic about any of it.
"I hope that's alright," she says, nodding at the kettle. "I found tea. I can make coffee if you'd rather."
"I'd rather you sit down and tell me why you're actually on my property."
She takes a moment, the kind of steady patience that comes from having weathered sharper words in the past. “I did tell you. Historical photography. Wrong turn. Storm.” She lifts the dish towel from her shoulder and folds it in thirds, precise in a way her rumpled state doesn’t predict.
“But I can also do that sitting down, if it helps.”
She sits.
I stay standing, which I recognize is a deliberate choice on my part and probably an obvious one.
She’s still wearing her denim jacket even though it soaked through completely—too stubborn or too distracted to take it off—and her hair has started drying in sections, curling at the ends without her permission.
She sets her camera bag on the floor beside the chair with careful, deliberate placement, the kind that tells you exactly what matters to her.
"You said you're a photographer."
"Yes."
"Of what, specifically."
"Forgotten places, mostly." She wraps both hands around the mug she's already claimed as hers.
"Abandoned farmhouses, old churches, one-room schoolhouses, family cemeteries.
The infrastructure of small-town America that everyone stops seeing because it's always been there. " She pauses. "Until it isn't."
I hold her gaze for a moment. Then I pull out the chair across from her and sit down, because this is my kitchen and I’ll conduct a conversation however I choose. “You make a living doing that.”
"I make a living," she says, which is not the same answer and she knows it. "Regional magazines pick up some of the work. I've contributed to preservation grants, historical society archives, a few academic publications. It's not predictable income but it's real work."
"Where are you based?"
Something crosses her face—not evasion, more like the particular expression of someone deciding how honestly to answer a simple question.
"I move around. My SUV is home base." She says it plainly, without apology or performance, and somehow that straightforwardness is more disarming than any explanation would have been.
"I've been working through the Midwest for about two years.
This part of Iowa has structures I've been trying to document for a while. "
"The grain facility near the eastern boundary."
"Among other things."
I don't ask what the other things are. Not yet. "Do you have a portfolio?"
She reaches into the bag without hesitation and produces a tablet, already unlocked, like she anticipated the question. She sets it on the table between us and slides it toward me without a word.
The first image is a barn.
Not an interesting barn—or it shouldn’t be.
It’s collapsed on one side, boards bleached silver-gray from decades of weather, the roof caved inward like a slow exhale.
A rusted tractor sits half-swallowed by the frame, visible only through the gap where the east wall gave out.
The late-afternoon light rakes across the structure, catching every warped plank and making the whole thing look strangely intentional, as if the building had arranged itself for the photograph.
I swipe to the next one.
A cemetery, small and rural, the headstones mostly illegible.
But she's framed it through the gap in a rusted iron fence, so the foreground is all corroded metal and the burial ground sits behind it like something protected rather than forgotten.
A child's pinwheel left at one of the graves is the only color in the image, red and white, sharp as a question mark.
I keep going.
A one-room schoolhouse interior, every desk still in place, a primer still open on the teacher's desk like the students stepped out for recess sixty years ago and never came back.
A grain elevator reflected in floodwater, doubled and warped.
A woman in her nineties sitting on a porch swing, looking at something beyond the frame, and the photograph doesn't tell you what she's seeing but somehow makes you certain it's the past.
Eleven images before I set the tablet down.
"You trained formally?"
She considers this with a patience that comes from experience rather than ease.
“I did tell you. Historical photography. Wrong turn. Storm.” She pulls the dish towel from her shoulder and folds it in thirds, a precise motion that doesn’t match the rest of her disheveled appearance.
“But I can also do that sitting down, if it helps.”
I turn the tablet face-down on the table, which is a habit—I think better without visual distraction—and she watches me do it without comment.
Outside, the storm is working itself into something serious.
I can hear it in the eaves, in the low pressure vibrating against the windows, in the particular quiet that fills a house when the world outside turns loud.
She’s watching me with those dark eyes, patient but intent, the kind of stillness that feels like she’s gathering data rather than waiting. It gives me the uneasy sense of being regarded the same way she studies her subjects.
"Emberland Ranch is undergoing a historical restoration initiative," I say.
"Several structures across the property require documentation for legal certification and the preservation trust we're establishing.
" I watch her face. "The work is significant.
The timeline is twelve to fourteen weeks depending on access and weather.
The person I contracted for the project fell through last month. "
She doesn't move. Doesn't rush to fill the silence with enthusiasm. She just holds her mug and waits for me to continue, which is not the reaction I expected and is therefore already annoying.
"I could offer a temporary contract. Documentation only—you shoot what I approve, in locations I designate, on a schedule coordinated with ranch operations.
" I name a daily rate that is reasonable by any professional standard.
"Housing is included in the arrangement.
There's a guest cottage on the east side of the main compound. "
She is quiet for a moment. The kettle clicks off. Rain hits the window above the sink in a sudden hard gust and then eases back.
"That's a fair rate," she says.
"It's a good rate."
"It's fair." She turns her mug a quarter turn on the table, something she seems to do when she's thinking. "Given the scope—twelve to fourteen weeks, presumably a significant volume of structures, legal-grade documentation standards—I'd want fifteen percent above what you quoted."
I take her in. She is sitting in my kitchen, in a damp jacket, with forty dollars to her name if I had to guess, negotiating against me from a position that is, objectively, entirely without leverage.
"You broke down outside my gate an hour ago."
"And you looked at my portfolio and offered me a contract, which means the negotiation is real.
" She meets my eyes with an evenness that I find, against my better judgment, genuinely impressive.
"I'm not trying to be difficult. But if you've been without a photographer for a month and the trust documentation has a timeline attached to it, my being here solves a problem for you as much as it solves one for me.
That's worth acknowledging in the rate."
The rain comes harder again. A branch somewhere outside scrapes the side of the house.
She is not wrong. That's the specific irritation of it—she has correctly identified the actual shape of this negotiation and stated it without drama or apology, sitting in borrowed warmth in a house she walked into twenty minutes ago.
I have sat across from men worth eight figures who couldn't read a room that clearly.
"Ten percent," I say.
"Twelve."
"Eleven, and the cottage has a full kitchen."
Something happens at the corner of her mouth—not quite a smile, more like the controlled suppression of one. "Eleven and the kitchen," she says. "Deal." She extends her hand across the table, and unlike at the gate, I take it this time. Her grip is firm, businesslike, brief.
I stand and carry my mug to the sink. "The guest cottage won't be accessible until tomorrow. Tonight there's a room upstairs, second door on the left." I set the mug down and turn. "The storm will pass by morning. We can arrange to have your vehicle brought in and assessed."
She nods once, her hand already closing around the camera-bag strap, a quick, familiar motion that keeps her gear within reach. She stands, and she’s shorter than she first seemed—five-foot-six at most—but the room shifts around her anyway, as if her presence sets its own scale.
"Mr. Ember," she says.
I stop in the doorway.
"Thank you." She says it simply, without performance. "For the gate. For this."
I look back at her once. She's standing in the middle of my kitchen like she's been here before—not comfortable exactly, but settled, present, the kind of person who occupies a space rather than moving through it.
"Get some sleep, Miss Anderson."
I leave her there, in the warm kitchen, with the storm pushing hard against the glass, and I walk to my office and sit at my desk without turning on the overhead light. I open my laptop and pull up her name and spend twenty minutes looking at every published photograph of hers I can find online.
They are all exactly as good as the ones she showed me.
That’s the last clear thought I have before the irritation sets in again, quiet and persistent, the kind that isn’t about her work at all but about the fact that I’m still thinking about her.