Chapter 3
Ellie
Holly has twelve kids, three cameras, and the full attention of every person in the room.
She circles the three folding tables I set up this morning, crouching beside each station, adjusting a kid's grip on the camera or tilting a lens toward the window light while twelve faces watch her like she's performing magic.
Three cameras between twelve kids. I told Holly it wouldn't work when she pitched the workshop.
She told me the cameras weren't the point.
She handed me a supply list and a timeline and said, "Trust me, Ellie.
I've worked with less." I trusted her. I also printed a sign-up rotation and laminated it, because trusting Holly doesn't mean abandoning logistics.
Lily's in the front row. She has her notebook open and she's sketching the camera angles Holly demonstrates, labeling them in handwriting so neat it looks typeset.
Colt sits in the back row with a paperback he hasn't turned in twenty minutes.
I know because I've noticed. The book rests open in his lap, spine cracked at the same page he landed on when he sat down, and his reading glasses have slid to the middle of his nose. He pushes them up. They slide. He forgets.
The library door opens and Rex ducks through it carrying a plastic bag. He crosses to Holly's station and holds up the bag.
"Memory cards," he says. "Picked up the last three at the shop on Fifth."
Holly takes the bag, checks the contents. Rex stays by the table, watching her work, and Holly lifts the camera and catches him before he notices. He hears the shutter and shakes his head.
"You could warn a guy. So I can give you my best side."
She doesn't look up from the viewfinder. "Where's the fun in that?"
She turns back to the kids without waiting for his response.
Rex kisses the top of Holly's head on his way out and tells her to call if she needs anything.
Holly waves him off without breaking stride, while I rearrange the supply shelf and pretend I'm not jealous of what they have.
I am, though. Every time I see them together I am.
The workshop moves into free shooting. Holly sends the kids to different corners of the library with instructions to photograph something that surprises them, and the room fills with the commotion of twelve pairs of sneakers scattering across hardwood.
Nina's at the far table helping a boy figure out the zoom, her belly pressed against the table edge, patient and unhurried.
Lily pairs up with a younger orc girl named Dani, she's maybe nine, with deep green skin and a braid thick enough to use as a rope.
Dani holds the camera with both hands and Lily adjusts her grip, showing her how to tuck her elbows in to keep it steady.
Two boys from the middle school drift toward Dani's station. I see it coming before they open their mouths.
"Did your dad's tusks scratch the camera?" The taller one says it loud enough for the table to hear, quiet enough that Holly, across the room, doesn't catch it.
Dani's shoulders pull inward. She lowers the camera to her lap.
Lily's head snaps up. Her jaw sets—her father's jaw, the same hard line—and her mouth opens.
The second boy leans in. "Why do freaks get to use the good cameras anyway?"
I'm across the room before I register moving. In the back row, I hear Colt's book hit the chair. But I'm already between the boys and Dani before he gets to his feet.
"I need you both to look at me."
They look. The taller one's smirk falters because my face doesn't match the cardigan.
"I know exactly what you sound like right now," I say.
"You sound like the adults who taught you those words.
The ones who call people freaks at the dinner table.
And you're repeating it, and right now you get to decide if that's who you want to be.
" I hold the taller boy's gaze until he drops it.
"Because the men who talk like that? They don't stop at words.
They put flyers on community boards and vote to cut funding for programs like this one, and they do it with a smile, and twenty years from now their kids don't call them on holidays.
That's the road. You're on the first mile of it. Turn around and be better."
The shorter boy goes red. He stares at his shoes.
"You can leave the workshop," I say. "Or you can sit down, pick up a camera, and be better than what I just heard. Those are your choices."
They leave, muttering something I can't hear. The door closes behind them and the library goes quiet.
Dani stares at me. Her hands grip the camera in her lap and she has the look I've seen on monster kids a dozen times in four years—the one that says she expected me to side with the boys, or at least to pretend I didn't hear them.
"You okay, Dani?" I crouch next to her station.
She nods. Her braid swings forward over her shoulder. "They say stuff like that at school too."
"I know, sweetie." I touch the edge of the camera in her hands. "You want to keep shooting?"
She lifts the camera. Points it at the window where the afternoon light cuts across the reading nook.
"Yeah," she says. "I do."
Lily hasn't moved. She stands two feet away, watching me, mouth still half open. She doesn't say anything. She just looks at me like she's never seen me before.
I straighten up. Smooth my skirt and go back to the supply shelf, and my hands shake for thirty seconds before they stop.
Holly catches my eye from across the room and gives me a nod. She saw.
The workshop runs another forty-five minutes.
Holly wraps up with a group review of the best shots.
Dani's window photograph makes the top three, and her green skin flushes darker when Holly pins it to the display board beside a harbor shot and a close-up of rain on the library's front steps. Lily took that one.
The kids filter out. Parents collect them in pairs and trios. Holly packs up the cameras and gives me a side-hug that smells like darkroom chemicals and coconut shampoo. "Same time next week, Ellie. And for the record? Those little shits deserved worse."
"Language. We're in a library."
Holly rolls her eyes. "Sorry, those little angels deserved way worse." She packs up the last camera and heads for the door.
Garrett ducks through the door as Holly leaves, a wrapped object under one arm, the brown paper folded neat despite fingers the size of sausages.
Nina crosses to him from where she's been stacking chairs, one hand resting on her belly, round now, visible even under the loose flannel.
She talks enough for both of them, which I've learned is just how they work.
"We brought something for Lily," Nina says. "Is she here?"
"She's somewhere around here taking photos."
"Garrett made it. Show her, babe."
Garrett sets the package on the circulation desk and unwraps it.
Two horses carved from walnut, polished until the grain catches the overhead light, standing nose to nose with their manes flowing in opposite directions.
A bookend. The detail in the hooves, the tendons of the legs, the individual strands of mane.
I've seen Garrett's carvings at the cabin, but this one hits different because he made it for a twelve-year-old girl who loves horses.
"This is beautiful," I say. "She'll lose her mind." I run my finger along one horse's mane.
"She mentioned horses at the clubhouse last week," Nina says. "Said she wanted one for her birthday, Colt of course said 'absolutely not,' and this one nodded like that settled it and went home and started carving." She nudges Garrett's arm. "He's subtle."
He doesn't grin. He shifts his weight, his dark eyes sweeping the room the way they always do. But the tips of his ears darken, the minotaur version of a flush.
"Lily talks about you constantly," Nina says.
She leans against the desk, one hand still on her belly.
"At the clinic, at the clubhouse, everywhere.
This morning she told Colt that Miss Frost thinks she should read Shirley Jackson next, and Colt apparently looked it up and said 'absolutely not' again, and Lily said 'Miss Frost already put it on hold for me.
'" Nina laughs. "Kids don't attach to people who don't deserve it. "
The library empties. The late-afternoon light turns amber and the building goes quiet.
Colt stands at the circulation desk. The paperback dangles from one hand, his index finger holding a page he never read. His glasses sit straight for once.
He doesn't say anything, just watches me work. I sort the returned cameras into their cases, stack Holly's handouts, cap two pens, and align the date stamp with the edge of the desk pad.
"Lily's mother would have done the same thing."
My hands stop moving.
He's never mentioned Maren to me. Not once, in six months of Saturday pickups and polite exchanges and the single real conversation we had a few days ago about George Eliot.
I know she existed because of the wedding ring he stopped wearing, because Lily sometimes starts a sentence with "Mom used to" and then checks her father's face and changes the subject.
He said her name to me. He compared me to her. My throat tightens.
"What do you mean?"
"Thank you," he says. "For protecting her."
I lift my gaze. He's looking at me. Not at the shelves, not at Lily's empty chair by the window. At me. And his face is different—softer, the distance gone, his eyes holding mine like he forgot to look away.
"She doesn't need protecting. She needs to know the adults around her aren't going to look the other way."
He adjusts his glasses and smiles at me.
My hands grip the edge of the desk. I don't know what to do with him looking at me like that. Like I'm not just Lily's librarian.
"I should get Lily," he says. His voice comes out rougher than usual. "She's in the parking lot. Holly let her take some shots outside."
"Oh, I almost forgot—Garrett dropped off a gift for Lily. He carved her a bookend."
"Garrett made her a bookend?"
"Yes, two horses, carved out of walnut."
He exhales through his nose. "That man." He taps the paperback against his palm. "See you Saturday, Miss Frost."
"See you then, Mr. Rivers."
He ducks through the door. I stand behind the desk and press my palms flat against the wood and breathe.
The library closes at five. I do the walkthrough. Lights, locks, thermostat, returns bin. On my way out I stop at the community board by the front entrance to check the flyers I pinned last week.
New ones sit on top of mine. Glossy stock. The Humans First logo in the corner, the H and F intertwined, clean and corporate, designed to look reasonable.
CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR CHILDREN'S SAFETY?
The first paragraph talks about "ensuring appropriate environments" and "community-led oversight of youth programming." No slurs. No threats. Just the same bigotry in nicer fonts, printed on cardstock that cost more than my monthly supply budget.
I tear them down. All four copies. Fold them in half and drop them in the recycling bin by the door.
Then I pull some of Holly's photographs from the display inside—kids with cameras from last month's workshop, the harbor in afternoon light, Lily's shot of the library at dusk—and pin them to the board where the flyers hung.
The board looks better this way.
I drive home. The apartment is exactly how I left it this morning. Clean counters, sorted mail, books on every surface. I built this life on purpose after Derek left. Five years of coming home to quiet, and I liked it until tonight.
Tonight it feels empty.
Colt's voice replays on a loop. Lily's mother would have done the same thing. He compared me to his dead wife. Not to replace her. Because he thought I'd have done what she did. My chest aches, I press my hand against it but it doesn't help.
I pick up my phone. Open my contacts. Scroll past the As and the Bs and find the Cs, where Colt Rivers sits in my phone under the contact I created from Lily's emergency form back in September. I've had his number for months. I've opened this contact four times and closed it five.
I type: Lily left her notebook at the library. Want me to hold it at the desk for her, or do you want to swing by and grab it?
The notebook is in Lily's backpack. I watched her zip it in there two hours ago.
This is a lie, a small and deliberate one, the kind of fiction I tell myself I'm above because I deal in facts and organized systems. But I need a reason to see him that isn't the real reason. I need one thread I can hold.
My thumb hits send before I can talk myself out of it.
The phone sits on the counter. The apartment stays quiet. I stare at the screen until it dims and then at the dark glass reflecting my kitchen back to me, and I wonder when I became a woman who invents excuses to text a man she's spent half a year pretending she doesn't want.
I think I've always been her. I just didn't have anyone worth making up excuses for.