“I’m not trying to come up with some crazy fake dating scheme,” she said in a rush. “I just thought that if someone was hitting on you, and you didn’t want them to…you and I are already staying in the same hotel room. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to say we were together.”
“A huge stretch?” he repeated, as if unsure of her meaning.
“I just know how hard it can be when a client is interested. If it would help you to pretend we were dating…”
“Oh. Right.” He blinked. “You mean Elka?”
“I just thought… You know what, never mind. Maybe you want to hook up with her and I’m misreading the whole situation.”
“No.” He grimaced. “No. I um…no. I appreciate it, but I don’t need you to do that. Elka is…I can handle her. If something comes up, I’ll figure it out.”
“You got it. No pretending that we’re madly in love.”
Ren gave her a strange, artificial smile, and Sarah felt oddly hurt by his flat response. It shouldn’t feel like a rejection, but it did.
“Anyway…” she began. “We should get to dinner.”
“Actually, that reminds me. At dinner, I usually sit at a different table than my assistant so we can answer more questions. It’s for practical reasons, as well. A table of twelve always takes forever to get service and finish a meal, and we need to get outside for shooting, so I always make reservations for two tables of six.”
“Right.” He was telling her that she was not supposed to sit with him, which was fine, of course. “Whatever you need.”
“Okay.” He looked at her for a long moment and then turned to put away his laptop.
When they enteredthe dining room, Elka waved to Ren. “Ren! I’ve saved you a spot.” She was already at a table with four people: Jack, the Dangols, and Kyle. Ren gave Sarah a questioning look.
“Go ahead,” Sarah said. “I’ll see you later.”
Ren nodded, then walked to the seat next to Elka. The blond woman shot Sarah a triumphant glance, and Sarah tried to mentally shake off the weirdness of the whole dynamic. She took a seat at the other table next to Rita and Selassie, who were bubbling over with excitement about the shoot. Both women were pretty, brown-skinned, and in their early fifties, but with very different builds: Rita was short, curvy, and freckled, and her black curly hair sparkled with bright red highlights. Selassie was tall and fit, with wide brown eyes and her dark hair tucked into a practical bun. Despite their mismatched heights, they had perfectly matched energies—sociable, voluble, and quick to laugh—and Sarah found herself charmed by them even though she suspected she would spend most of the week helping them figure out their cameras.
The rest of the table consisted of a man in his early fifties named Fred who wore a nice dinner jacket and turned out to be a politician from Ottawa, a blond American in his thirties named Cole who explained that he had sold a tech company the year before and was currently starting a new one, and a retired man named Grisha with close-cropped silver hair who sounded Russian but explained that he had made his money in crypto and currently lived in Greece.
After they had placed their orders, Fred gave her a thoughtful look.
“So you wouldn’t happen to be the Sarah Drakenberg from the ‘Babies’ series, would you?”
She was frozen in a brief moment of panic. “Yes, that was me.”
“We have one of your photos with our daughter Haley,” the man added. “Fred Corbeau. I never met you, but you may remember my wife Ella.”
She only distantly remembered the name. “Of course. How is Haley doing these days?”
“She’s great. She’s eight now. She’s our youngest and the older ones are jealous of that photo and wish we’d done all three of them. So are you still shooting babies these days?”
Sarah forced a smile. “No, I’ve been busy with a divorce series,” she joked.
“Ah,” he said, catching her tone. “And what does that consist of?”
“Lots of burned out trucks in the middle of fields.”
He laughed as Grisha raised his eyebrows. “Baby photos? What is this?”
“It was something I did for a few years in Toronto,” Sarah explained. She had taken down her website, but she pulled out her phone and Googled her own photo series and handed the phone to Grisha, not looking closely at the images.
“It paid the bills, but it has definitely run its course,” she added. For the first time, she had managed to say those words without instantly connecting them to her own life, her own disasters. Grisha gave a quick nod of amusement, then handed the phone to Cole.
Meanwhile, Fred pulled out his phone to find his daughter’s photo: Sarah remembered it as soon as she saw it. The baby had been made to look like she was clinging to a log floating down a river as part of a log drive in the Canadian wilderness. Sarah had arranged a real log drive at a historical re-enactment site for the purpose, sending thirty logs down a river to procure that part of the photo, then had taken the closer image of baby Haley leaning over a slightly damp log in her studio. The end result of her photo editing was worth it: the baby looked at once terrified and like a total daredevil, riding a log down the Canadian river rapids.
It was a gimmicky shot, Sarah could acknowledge, but a well-composed and funny one.
