Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
YATES
The resort sat above a lake still glassy with early autumn cold, the kind of property that photographed itself if you pointed a camera in nearly any direction, and the shoot moved efficiently through the afternoon, the photographer, a meticulous woman named Ines, arranging Bianca and me at intervals along the property, the dock, the lobby's soaring stone fireplace, a path through birch trees turning gold at the edges.
"Closer," Ines said, at the fireplace, adjusting Bianca's shoulder with two fingers. "Yates, angle toward her slightly. Good. Now, Bianca, if you'd just lean in, like you're about to say something only he can hear."
Bianca leaned in, her shoulder against my chest, and I held the pose because that was the job, and felt nothing beyond the mechanical awareness of a photograph being taken, no attraction, no discomfort exactly, just the flat professionalism of a man executing a task he'd agreed to perform.
"Now, if you two could just," Ines started, gesturing vaguely toward something that would have brought our faces within inches of each other, and I stepped back before she finished the sentence.
"No," I said. "That's past the line we discussed with your team."
Ines held up both hands, unbothered, already moving to a different setup. Bianca caught my eye afterward, something like appreciation in her expression, though whether it was for the boundary itself or simply for handling it without making a scene, I couldn't tell.
* * *
We ate dinner on the terrace that evening, work concluded for the day, and Bianca asked the kind of question that arrives easily between two people who've spent hours in close professional proximity and have run out of surface-level things to discuss.
"Is there anyone back home who might be hurt by all this?" she asked, gesturing loosely at the resort, the cameras packed away for the night, the whole apparatus of the campaign. "I've done enough of these arrangements to know they can complicate things for people who weren't consulted."
I felt the question land somewhere I hadn't prepared for, and answered the way I'd been answering everything lately, technically true and strategically incomplete. "My private life is settled," I said. "Everyone involved understands the arrangement."
She nodded, apparently satisfied, and I watched her interpret settled exactly the way I'd half hoped and half feared she would, as the tail end of something rather than the middle of an eleven-year marriage still very much alive.
I had a clear opportunity, sitting there in the cooling evening air, to correct the misunderstanding before it calcified into something she'd built her professional trust around.
I let the moment pass instead, telling myself it wasn't the right time, that clarifying now might complicate the shoot's remaining day, that I would tell her everything once the acquisition closed and the whole arrangement dissolved naturally.
I understood, even as I constructed that justification, that it was built out of convenience rather than principle, and I set that understanding aside the way I'd set aside every other uncomfortable recognition over the preceding weeks.
* * *
The storm rolled in overnight, grounding flights across the region, and Graham called before I'd finished my coffee the next morning.
"We could charter something," he said, "but honestly, Yates, staying gives us a second shoot day we didn't budget for, golden hour shots we couldn't get yesterday because of the light. This kind of coverage doesn't come free twice."
"I have somewhere I need to be tomorrow evening."
"I understand that. But think about the return here. One more day, and we walk away with material that carries us through the entire back half of the campaign."
I looked out at the rain sheeting across the lake, thought about the corner table waiting at the restaurant on Ninth Street, thought about Rosalie's face when I'd left the house two days earlier, and made the call I would spend months afterward understanding as the true turning point of everything that followed, though at the time it felt like nothing more than a minor scheduling adjustment.
"One more night," I told Graham. "But I need to be home by tomorrow evening no matter what."
I called Rosalie from the resort's covered terrace, watching rain blur the lake into a gray smear.
"The weather's grounded everything," I said. "I need to move our dinner by one night. I'm so sorry, Rosie, I know the timing is terrible."
The silence on the other end of the line stretched longer than I expected, long enough that I checked my phone to confirm the call hadn't dropped.
"Of course," she said finally, her voice even, controlled in a way I mistook, in that moment, for simple understanding rather than the sound of a woman deciding, quietly and without further argument, exactly how much more of this she was willing to absorb.
"I'll make it up to you," I said. "I promise."
"I know you'll try," she said, which wasn't quite the same thing as believing me, though I didn't catch the distinction at the time, too relieved by the absence of an argument to notice that her agreement had stopped sounding like faith and started sounding like something closer to resignation.
I found Bianca in the resort's small library later that evening, curled into a leather chair by the fire with a script in her lap, and something about the ordinary domesticity of the scene, rain against the windows, the fire cracking softly, made the whole arrangement feel briefly, uncomfortably intimate in a way that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with proximity I hadn't fully accounted for.
"Everything all right?" she asked, glancing up. "You look like a man who just canceled something important."
"Postponed, not canceled," I said, settling into the chair across from her, farther away than the fire's warmth would have suggested was necessary. "My anniversary dinner. I'm moving it a day."
"Anniversary of what?"
The question sat there for a moment, small and unremarkable to her, enormous to me, and I answered it the way I'd been answering everything lately, true enough to satisfy the asker, incomplete enough to protect the version of myself I still wanted to believe in.
"Something important," I said. "Nine years running. "
"That's a long partnership," she said, easily, clearly assuming business, and I let the assumption stand, watching the fire rather than her face, understanding, in some small, unexamined corner of myself, that I had just been handed another clear moment to correct a misunderstanding and had, once again, simply let it pass.
We talked for another hour about nothing consequential, her production company's early slate, a director she was hoping to work with, the exhaustion of being photographed constantly without ever quite being seen, and I found her easy to talk to in the specific way strangers are sometimes easy to talk to, precisely because they don't yet know enough about you to ask the harder questions.
Ines, the photographer, joined us briefly near the end of the evening, reviewing the day's shots on her laptop, and turned the screen toward me at one point, showing an image she was particularly pleased with, Bianca and me at the dock, both of us laughing at something genuinely funny that had happened just before the shutter clicked, an unposed moment that had turned out, in her professional judgment, more compelling than any of the arranged shots from earlier in the day.
"This one's going to run somewhere prominent," Ines said. "It's the most natural chemistry we've captured all trip."
I looked at the photograph for a long moment, seeing exactly what she saw, two people who looked, in that single frozen instant, at ease with each other, unburdened, and felt something uncomfortable settle in my stomach at how convincingly a genuine laugh, captured at the right moment, could be made to suggest an intimacy that didn't exist between us.
I said nothing about my discomfort. I simply nodded, told her the photograph looked great, and went to bed early, leaving Bianca and Ines still discussing composition by the dying fire.
I lay awake a long while in my separate suite that night, listening to the rain against the windows, thinking about the easy, uncomplicated hour I'd just spent by the fire compared to the strained, careful conversations that had come to define most of my recent evenings with Rosalie.
It would have been simple, dangerously simple, to tell myself the difference meant something about which relationship was working.
I understood, even as the thought crossed my mind, that it meant nothing of the kind.
Ease with a stranger who required nothing of you was not the same as intimacy with a wife who required, rightly, that you show up for her.
I fell asleep telling myself I understood the difference clearly.
I would spend the following weeks discovering how thin that understanding was.
I woke early the next morning, before the rest of the resort stirred, and walked down to the dock alone, needing the quiet before the day's shooting schedule began.
The lake had gone perfectly still overnight, the storm clouds finally cleared, and I stood at the end of the weathered planks watching mist rise off the water, thinking about Rosalie waking up alone in our house, about the anniversary card I imagined she'd bought and not yet given me, about the ache of being exactly where my ambition had brought me and feeling, for once in longer than I wanted to admit, that I'd rather be somewhere else.
Ines found me there an hour later, camera in hand, already scouting the morning light. "You look like a man having second thoughts," she observed, not unkindly, adjusting her lens cap.
"Just thinking about home," I said.
"Ah." She studied me for a moment longer than the comment warranted.
"You know, in fifteen years of doing this kind of work, I've learned to spot the difference between people performing a story for the camera and people who believe in what they're performing.
You're good at the first one, Mr. Hargrove.
I'm not sure you've ever quite managed the second. "
I didn't have an answer for that, watching her walk back toward the lodge to prepare for the day's shoot, and stood alone on the dock a while longer, turning her observation over, understanding, with a discomfort I couldn't quite shake, that a stranger with a camera had just described the exact full extent of my marriage more precisely than I'd managed to describe it myself in months.
I called my brother that morning from the dock, needing someone who knew me before all of this to talk to. Leo picked up on the second ring, background noise suggesting he was already at a job site somewhere.
"You sound off," he said, after the briefest exchange of pleasantries. "Everything all right up there?"
"I don't know," I admitted, more honestly than I usually allowed myself to be with him.
"I keep telling myself this whole arrangement is contained, strategic, nothing that touches what's real.
But I'm standing on a dock at a resort I have no business being at three days before my anniversary, and I can't explain to myself why that felt like an acceptable trade. "
Leo was quiet for a moment. "You know I've never loved this whole campaign idea," he said.
"I didn't say much because it's your company and your marriage, and I figured you knew what you were doing.
But since you're asking, honestly, no. I don't think it's as contained as you're telling yourself it is. "
"What makes you say that?"
"Because contained things don't usually require this much internal justification," Leo said. "You've called me twice this month explaining why something that looks bad isn't bad. That's not what contained looks like, Yates. That's what talking yourself into something looks like."
I didn't have a response for that, the accuracy of it landing harder than I expected from my usually understated brother, and we ended the call shortly after, Leo needing to get back to his site, me left alone on the dock with an observation I wasn't yet ready to fully absorb but would find myself returning to, uncomfortably, for weeks afterward.
I spent the rest of that morning going through the motions of the shoot's second day, half present, Leo's words circling uncomfortably beneath every posed photograph and every carefully constructed answer to Ines's direction. At lunch, Bianca noticed my distraction.
"You've been somewhere else all morning," she observed, over sandwiches on the terrace. "Everything all right?"
"Just a difficult conversation with my brother," I said, offering more honesty than I'd intended.
"Want to talk about it?"
I considered the offer for a moment, tempted by the ease of confiding in someone who required nothing from the confession beyond simple listening, and then declined, understanding, even as I felt the pull of it, that unburdening myself to Bianca about my marriage would be its own small betrayal, using her as an emotional resource in exactly the same casual, unexamined way I'd been using her professionally.
"I appreciate the offer," I said instead, "but I think this is something I need to work through with the people involved."
She nodded, accepting the boundary without pressing further, and we finished lunch making easier conversation about her production company's upcoming slate, and I noted, walking back to the afternoon's shoot, how carefully I'd just drawn a line I probably should have drawn weeks earlier, the recognition arriving, as most of my recognitions seemed to be arriving lately, a beat too late to change anything that had already happened, though perhaps, I told myself, not too late to change what happened next.