"The angle of the light here," he says, pointing. "Two degrees different and you lose the detail in the wing feathers. I waited four mornings for that angle."
"Four mornings."
"Fifth morning was right."
I lean closer to look at the screen, and I'm aware of how close we're standing, his shoulder against mine, his hand on the laptop trackpad. He smells like woodsmoke and something clean, and I am, despite everything, extremely distracted.
At some point, he reaches past me to scroll to the next image and his arm brushes mine. Neither of us moves away, and we stay like that, shoulder to shoulder, while he talks through three more shots.
I ask real questions and Shaw answers them. Somewhere in the middle of it I realise this is the most I've heard him talk. Here, in his own space, about his own work — he's almost voluble. The words come easily because they're all about something he knows completely and loves without reservation.
It's the most attractive thing I've seen in years. A person fluent in their own life.
We spend most of the day on the ridge.
He shows me the darkroom — briefly, just the door, not an invitation inside yet, but the gesture of showing me it exists. I notice that. The darkroom is private in a way the rest of the cabin isn't.
We eat lunch on the porch. He makes it without fuss — bread, cheese, something from a jar he'd put up himself. We sit with the valley below us and the afternoon heat building around the cabin, and it's easy in a way I'd forgotten things could be easy.
I tell him about my grandmother's land near Prince George. The way she taught me to read a valley — where the water runs in spring, where the animals shelter in winter, what the tree line tells you about the soil. He listens the way he listens to everything worth listening to. Asks one question that shows he was tracking all of it: "Does she still work the land herself?"
"She's seventy-four," I say. "She works it differently now. More watching, less doing. She says that's the better part anyway."
He looks at the valley. "She's right."
Shaw kisses me — slow and warm and deliberate, one hand at my jaw, his thumb tracing the line of it, and I grip the front of his shirt and kiss him back and the afternoon light comes through the cabin window and I think: this is what it's supposed to feel like. Easy and certain and completely itself.
When he pulls back, he looks at me for a moment. "Wanted to do that all day," he says.
"You could have done it earlier," I tell him.
Toward the evening, something shifts.
Not badly but I can feel him thinking. There's a quality to his silence that changes when he's working something out, a slight closing, like a shutter adjusting down. I've learned to recognise it.
I don't push. I know what it looks like when someone is trying to work something out and I've learned not to interrupt that process. In my marriage, I always interrupted it. Tried to help by talking, which was never what was needed. I'm trying a different way now.
We drive back down as the light goes amber over the ridge. He's quieter than usual and I let him be quiet, and I watch the valley come back up to meet us and I think about the worktable, the memory cards in the jar, the five mornings for two degrees of light.
At the hotel, he parks, and we sit for a moment.
"There will be fireworks tomorrow," he says. The same not-quite-a-question he's been offering me every day, which I've come to understand is as close as he gets toI want to see you againand which lands on me exactly that way.
"I’m looking forward to it," I say, giving a not-quite answer to his not-quite question.
I get out. Walk to the hotel door. I don't look back because I'm genuinely okay. I'm not waiting to be chosen. I know what I felt on the riverbank yesterday, and I know what I felt at his cabin this afternoon, and I know what the quality of his attention means when he turns it on me.
He's working something out up there on the ridge tonight. I can give him that.
I go up to my room and stand at the balcony window with a cup of tea and look out at the ridge in the last of the light. Somewhere up that gravel track, there's a porch facing west anda worktable covered in lenses and a jar of memory cards on the windowsill.
And a man sitting with something he hasn't said yet.
six
Shaw
CanadaDay.
