“Hilarious!” Rita said when Fred passed around the image. “So Rene saw these and asked you to help him?”
“Oh, no. We’ve been friends since university,” Sarah said.
“The last woman he had as an assistant,” Grisha said, “she was beautiful. Like a model. Stunning.”
Of course she was, Sarah thought.
“So you and Rene, you two are together, right?” Selassie asked.
Sarah shook her head. “No. We’re just very old friends.”
“He is so gorgeous,” Rita said. “He looks like he should be a movie star.”
“He’s very talented, too,” Sarah offered.
“Well, so are you,” Selassie cried. “Now I want a photo of me on a log floating down a river.”
“Maybe in my twenties,” Rita said. “Now I’d look like one of the logs.” The joke bothered Sarah a little, the casual dismissal Rita had made of her own body. It was too close to what Sarah had often felt about herself.
“You know what?” Sarah said. “If you two wear swimsuits under your clothes tonight, then after we get some Milky Way shots, I’ll take a portrait of you two. We’ll do some kind of mermaid-themed shot on the beach at night.”
Selassie applauded. “Oh, we’re doing it,” she agreed. “That is definitely a plan.”
The conversation paused when the food arrived, and Sarah thought again about her casual joke about doing a ‘Divorce’ series. Even though she had been kidding, as soon as she had spoken the words, she had gotten a vivid image in her head: a cherry-red pickup truck from the 1950s, alone in the middle of a wheat field in fall, ablaze with flames that shot up ten feet tall as it burned alone, no water nearby, no source for the fire, ready to burn down the whole world.
She could shoot it in autumn, she thought. She would just need the truck. Or…she could do that if she were still doing photography. Which she wasn’t.
Then another idea followed the first one in her head, like a dam inside her had broken.
What if she created aMy Divorced Lifeseries that followed up on herSingle Lifeseries? What if she restaged the same photos, over a decade later…with her in similar poses, only the details would be different: different books on the bed, different pajamas, her face looking weary instead of hopeful, pessimistic instead of gleeful, her make-up smeared instead of perfectly applied, but still somehow…funny?
As soon as she had that thought, she could visualize the show at the Kristman Gallery: the old and new images lined up side by side, her then and her now. Single and divorced. It would sell, she suspected. Or at least it would gain attention, create conversations, be the kind of thing that might get covered by the press.
It could launch her career again.
Why hadn’t she thought of it before? It was a clever idea but also an obvious one. So why hadn’t she thought to do it?
She hadn’t thought of it because she’d spent the last few years feeling hollowed out. By infertility. By Danny’s infidelity. By giving up on her baby series and then her career. By the finality of divorce.
There had been no Sarah left to come up with ideas.
She glanced at Ren, who was leaning over to joke with Kyle under Elka’s admiring gaze. He didn’t belong to her; she knew that. But he had sensed that she needed rescuing. It was frustrating—annoying—that it was working, but it was. Being around him was slowly making her feel like herself again. She wondered if this whole week was an elaborate plot to help her make her way back to photography.
Or maybe it was just convenient for him to have an assistant who was already in Newfoundland.
Either way, she knew—as soon as she thought about the ‘My Divorce’ series—that she was going to do it. It came to her as clearly as her best ideas always had: all at once, and with a sense of certainty. Her heart thrummed with a desire to get back to work.
When they stoppedby their room after dinner to pick up their gear, Ren paused in the doorway. “Hey, we’re doing some carpooling tonight because there’s not a lot of parking at the beach location. Elka asked me to give her a ride and Kyle offered to take you. I thought Selassie and Rita could follow you and Kyle in their car. They don’t seem very confident navigating the area, based on their questions earlier, so I think they should follow someone else.”
“And you’d be alone with Elka?” She couldn’t help but watch his expression carefully.
“Kyle thinks it will be good for me to deal with Elka one way or the other.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows.
Ren caught her eye and huffed out a laugh. “It’s fine. Kyle likes to put me in tricky situations to see how I’ll react. He’s a friend but he likes giving me a hard time. Are you okay driving over with him?”
“Of course,” Sarah said. “We can ask other people to come in our car, too.”
