“Are we talking about the one who looks like a lost Hemsworth brother or the one who looks like Alain Delon?” Lucas asked.
“I can have both. Why not both?” Jasmine said.
Right then, Ren turned his eyes toward Sarah. His gaze locked with hers and for a moment he looked as frozen as she felt. He didn’t smile, just stared for so long that he lost track of his conversation, and she watched him blink and then ask the blond man to repeat what he’d been saying.
She should have known Ren would be here. She should have asked Paul about it, but for some reason it had never crossed her mind that he would come. In her head, Ren was forever in Las Vegas, raising a child, sleeping with redheads. She hadn’t known that he and Paul even kept in touch. She hadn’t asked.
“Looks like the hot guy only speaks French,” Lucas said with a sad sigh to Jasmine. “Just my luck.”
“That’s Ren,” Sarah finally said. “He speaks English.” She took a step forward, just as a dark-haired woman stepped into her path to greet them.
“You made it to the ends of the earth!” cried the woman, looking between Lucas and Jasmine. This must be Abby, Paul’s bride. She turned to Sarah with a grin. “Are you Sarah? Thank you so much for rescuing these two. I had to run around all day finding tiny items with white flowers on them.”
“Happy to help,” Sarah said.
“I’m Abby. Did I say that? If not, blame it on bride brain. I don’t think I’ve formed a coherent sentence in the last forty-eight hours.”
“Babe, you look so radiant that I hate you a little,” Jasmine told Abby.
“It’s the sea air. I look exactly the same, but the air is making you drunk and confused.”
“Is that what Newfoundlanders get to blame things on?” Sarah asked. “That would explain my entire high school experience.”
Abby laughed, and Sarah saw how radically different Paul’s new bride was from Patricia. This woman seemed warm and funny but utterly grounded, the kind of person who would never put pristine white sofas in an apartment where she planned to serve bright orange cocktails. She was definitely closer to forty than thirty, which also felt like a small relief.
“And you’re okay taking pictures of the wedding?” Abby asked Sarah. “Because Paul said you offered to do that as your gift. But we have two guests willing to take photos, so if you want to relax, please tell me and I’ll shift it to our other volunteer.”
“I offered to help out as well,” came a male voice. It was Ren, standing at her elbow, smiling at her.
Sarah turned to him. “Take photos?” Her brain seemed to be working slower than usual.
Abby looked between them. “Is that okay? Since you’re both professional photographers, Paul thought you could both give us that as your wedding gift, but seriously, if one of you wants to bow out…”
“A professional photographer?” Sarah asked.
Ren nodded. “That’s what I do now, yeah.”
“Oh.” She stared at him, confused. She vaguely remembered him having a few photos in a gallery, but that had been years ago.
“I’m going to let you guys get settled, put your bags down,” Abby said. “And then a few of us have to do the ceremony rehearsal out back, and dinner is a five-minute walk from here. All the information is in the welcome bags in your rooms.”
Sarah stood back so Abby could throw her arms around her New York friends for an extra hug. She turned to Ren, finding it difficult to meet his eyes now that it was just the two of them.
“We’ll talk later maybe?” Sarah said to him.
“Yeah, of course,” he said softly, looking her over. Sarah knew she looked different now. Her hair had gone from ash blond to bubbly blond to its current warm honey color, and she tended to iron it out into carefully constrained waves. But she knew her face looked older. Of course it did.
When Sarah stayed out late when she was in her early twenties, she would sometimes wake up with a weary, colorless pallor, light-brown smudges beneath her eyes and faint wrinkles across her forehead. Now Sarah had discovered that this was the normal face she saw every morning before putting make-up on. Forty looked to her like twenty-five after going on a bad bender. Maybe that’s what her last fifteen years had been: one long, rough night. She wished he weren’t still so gorgeous. It was a little offensive, frankly.
She forced another smile before she turned to walk towards the check-in desk at the hotel, reminding herself that Ren had hurt her. Seeing him again had made her briefly forget. She always did this when it came to him. She was too ready to forgive. But this was Paul’s second wedding and she had no plans of repeating the mistakes from his first one.
And also…Ren was a professional photographer?
As soon as she got to her hotel room, she looked him up on her cell phone: ‘Rene Durand photographer.’ She didn’t know what to expect, but a website came up right away: ‘Durand Night Photography.’ The page was filled with artistic, gorgeous nature photos taken in the hours between dusk and dawn. There were shots of the Milky Way over the desert, the Northern Lights over a snowy tundra, snow-capped mountains with shooting stars raining down above them, swirling star trails spinning through the sky in a two-hour-long exposure.
The story of his business was summed up on his website in large, high-contrast prose. It had begun with him bringing clients on photography workshops to Zion National Park outside of Las Vegas. Then his workshops had expanded: to the Grand Canyon, then Joshua Tree, then to Banff, to Iceland, to Norway and New Zealand. He taught people how to do astrophotography and night photography, shooting the Milky Way and the Northern Lights in far-flung places for eye-popping prices. He could easily be making a living entirely as a photographer, now—she could live quite comfortably on what he must be making from workshops alone.
How had Paul never told her this?
