“Flick the settings to video, then press down on the shutter to record. Take long videos. It’s better to cut the clip than to wish you had filmed more.”
She fiddles around with the strap, securing it around her neck, and then points the lens out the rolled-down window. Fear takes me by the throat, and in the calmest voice I can muster—which is difficult when she dangles my favorite lens out the window of a moving vehicle—I say, “Please keep the camera in the car.”
“Oh, right.” She blushes, pulling it back to safety, where I can breathe properly.
I turn up the music, and Sofía takes dozens of videos of the forest. I slow my speed in some sections for her, then screech to a stop when she spots a rainbow lorikeet and screams so loudly my heart stops in my chest.
The woman has quite the set of lungs.
“I got it,” she yells, outstretching the camera to me.
Foot pressed on the brake, I select the most recent video in the gallery. Her hand is surprisingly steady, and the video clip zooms in on the bird perched in a tree, its bright rainbow feathers a beacon between the green leaves. It flaps its wings, readjusting itself on the branch to pick at berries.
“This is incredible.”
“You think so?” she asks, leaning over the center console. I turn the camera in her direction and replay what she recorded. Her eyes flick between me and the screen.
She’s watching me, I realize,to decipher my reaction.
“It will make the final cut, for sure.”
She tugs her lips together to hide what I know is a pleased smile, and after Doug honks behind us, I resume our adventure, handing her the camera.
By the time we reach the beach where the popular shipwreck is visible at low tide, there are a dozen other LandCruisers in the sand. A tour group takes photos of the dilapidated, rusted vessel, and I park farther down the beach.
Camera wrapped around her neck, she scrunches her nose at the distance.
“Doug’s going to want to get drone footage,” I explain. “It will be easier to do from here than in that chaos.”
“I thought you loved chaos,” she teases, leaping from the passenger side and into the sand.
She stumbles but rights herself before she face-plants. Doug and Molly park beside us and jump out.
“Did you see that bird?” Molly asks. “It was adorable!”
I’ve seen many beautiful things in my life, but the joy and pride that spread across Sofía’s face as she shows Molly her video is in the top five. I’m enraptured by the soft glow of her cheeks and the way she nibbles on her plush lower lip—until a voice clears beside me.
“You’re doing it again,” Doug says, unzipping the bag that houses the drone.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at her like you did on the research vessel.”
I gulp. “I don’t know what you mean.”
He clarifies, though it’s unnecessary. “Like she’s at the end of every road you drive down. Your center point. It’s how I look at Molly.”
Doug glances over to his wife, who’s waving her hands through the air as she chats with Sofía, the both of them animated while they gush over her video.
I never quite understood what Doug meant on the research vessel when I told him I liked Sofía. Not quite an attachment, but an intense curiosity and urge to learn everything about her.
He told me it was a dangerous game to play.
Sometimes you learn what you don’t want to know, but in that rare, once-in-a-lifetime encounter, you meet someone, you learn everything about them, and they become the end of the road—the person you’re always moving toward, no matter where you are. You could be a thousand miles away, but every path you take will lead to them.
For Doug, Molly is that end.
“We’re friends,” I say, hating how the words sour in my mouth.
