“Go ahead.”
“When I was running campaigns in New York, the best content we ever produced was the stuff the clients hadn’t asked for. Somebody’s phone would catch a warehouse worker laughing during a product shoot, and that one frame would outperform everything we’d spent three weeks planning.” She waved her hand. “The client would always ask if we could do more of that. And we’d just say we could try.”
“That’s very inspirational.”
“Don’t be mean to me on my own deck.”
Melissa almost smiled. “I’m not being mean. I’m being scared.”
The word came out before she could pull it back. She hadn’t planned to say it. Cassidy looked at her, and whatever business-mode response she’d been forming softened.
“Of the people shots,” Cassidy said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of taking something from someone.” Melissa looked at the seagull. It still hadn’t moved. “There’s a line. Between capturing a moment and stealing it. I crossed that line once and somebody’s life got worse because of it.”
Cassidy was quiet for a moment. The breeze off the water moved her hair across her forehead, and she pushed it back.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“The Sally photo. Did you steal that?”
“I wasn’t even aiming at her.”
“But if you had been. If you’d seen the laugh happening and raised the camera on purpose. Would that have been stealing?”
Melissa didn’t answer right away. She turned the question over in her head the way she turned a lens cap in her fingers, feeling the edges of it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I think you do know. I think you know the difference between a photo for a community website and a hurricane photo sold to a wire service. And I think the fact that you’re sitting here worrying about it means you’re not the person who’s going to cross that line again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right. I don’t. But I know what a person looks like when they don’t care about the people in their photographs, and that’s not you. That person wouldn’t be on my deck feeling sick about a blurry candid of Sally Morris laughing with Henry Murphy.”
Melissa pressed her lips together. Her hands were tight on the camera body. She made herself relax them, one finger at a time.
“The still lifes are the job,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The people shots are extra.”
“If you want them to be.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
They sat there for a while. The seagull finally moved, flapped his wings, then flew out across the water. Cassidy opened her laptop again, and Melissa watched the waves roll into shore.
“Cassidy.”
“Hm?”
“Thank you for not making that into a bigger thing than it was.”
