“Your restraint has been noted.”
“I was going to give you until the end of the month and then pretend I forgot about it and send one casual, no-pressure check-in.”
“I appreciate the plan.”
“Are you sure?” Cassidy said, and underneath the bright voice there was the question she actually wanted answered. “This isn’t me wearing you down, right? You actually want this?”
“I want to try it.” She wrapped her hands around the mug she hadn’t asked for. “That’s as much as I can honestly give you right now.”
Cassidy nodded once. “I’ll take it.”
“There’s a condition.”
“Of course there is.” She did not sound annoyed. She sounded like she’d been waiting for it.
“I work at my own pace. No deadlines. Not real ones. If we agree on a shot list for the website and I need three weeks to get one image instead of three days, you don’t push me. If a festival event happens and I can’t lift the camera that day, I don’t lift the camera that day. No pressure for perfect shots. Nothing on a schedule.”
Cassidy didn’t answer immediately. She sipped her coffee. She looked at the palm fronds moving outside her window.
“Okay,” she said.
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.” Cassidy put the mug down. “Melissa, I ran myself into a wall hard enough that they sent me down here for two months with instructions not to think.” She stopped. Picked at the edge of her notebook. “I know what you’re asking for. You won’t get pushed. Not by me.”
Melissa looked at her. “Thank you.”
Cassidy opened her notebook. “Don’t thank me yet, because now I’m going to get excited about this out loud, and I need you to tell me if I’m being too much.”
“Go ahead.”
Cassidy flipped a page and started talking the way people talked when they’d been saving up ideas.
The town website first. The photo library Linda West had been asking for since before Cassidy had ever set foot in Starlight Shores. Signature shots of Main Street in different weather, the harbor at three different tides, the Sandpiper’s deck packed at sunset, Tides & Tales with the window display lit from inside. Not polished, not tourist-brochure, nothing that looked like it had been flown in from Tampa. Real. The town in its actual body.
Then the festival. Cassidy was already running prep shots through her head, setup photos for the Beacon, portraits of this year’s committee for the program, a working photo library the festival could reuse next year and the year after, build up an archive so every incoming chair wasn’t starting from scratch. Behind-the-scenes. Community faces. Hands.
“Hands?” Melissa said.
“Oh, I have a thing about hands.” Cassidy waved her own, noticed she was doing it, kept going. “People trust a photograph of hands. You see somebody’s face and you’re judging. You see somebody’s hands doing real work and you’re on their side. If you want, forget I said that.”
“I don’t hate it.”
“You don’t hate it.” Cassidy wrote something down. “Progress.”
“Cassidy. Pace.”
“Yes. Pace. Sorry.” She closed the notebook on her finger to keep her place. “Here’s what I’m actually proposing. You give me one shot a month for the website, minimum, to keep Linda from panicking. Anything else is gravy. For the festival, we build a shot list together, and you pick which ones you’ll do and which ones I hire out. You don’t have to shoot a single face you don’t want to shoot. If all you do in August is photograph the banner hardware, that’s what you do. I’ll work around you.”
“You’re making it very hard to argue with you.”
“I’ve had training.”
Melissa let out a small breath. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
